Five, Six, Seven, Nate!

by Tim Federle

  “I’m sorta dyin’ here, Calvin,” I say, fanning myself.

  He sits on Jordan’s makeup table, folding a clipboard onto his lap.

  “So you called me up here, huh? You want to go over blocking, I assume? You want to talk through how scary all this is? How bizarre it is that you’re not even understudying Elliott”—he looks both ways and drops his voice—“even though you gave by far the most riveting audition, believe me. Nobody else had the balls to slam into the wall, pretending it was a spaceship.” He shakes away the image and clasps my shoulder. “So were you just hoping to talk through how overwhelming all this is?”

  “Calvin?”

  “Yeah, buddy?”

  “I was just hoping you could get me some deodorant.”

  He grunts.

  “I forgot my Mitchum at home”—the brand he recommended at the audition—“and, well, you know. I was surrounded by girls a minute ago. And didn’t want to ask any of them.”

  Calvin’s face breaks into an impression of a face doing a smile. “That’s it?”

  “That’s it, yeah. And maybe a candy bar or something for energy.”

  “Right,” he says, popping to his feet. “Or maybe even something real and nutritious. I’ll coordinate with—who was that in the hallway?” He pretends to get casual, glancing at his clipboard.

  “My aunt?” I say. If I could redo it I’d go: “My violently single aunt?”

  “Sure,” he goes, his lips creeping into a smirk. He pretends to write something on a stack of papers, which is what people do when they try to trick their mood into playing another part.

  “My Aunt Heidi! She’s amazing and full of potential.” That’s what Mom says about her. But man, that’s pretty lame in this setting. Still, Calvin laughs.

  “Okay, I’ll send a P.A. out to get you deodorant.”

  “Don’t say who it’s for!” I say, or maybe yell.

  “Relax. Our secret. And more importantly, are you all set on this afternoon’s emergency rehearsal schedule, to prep for tonight?”

  My ketchup-smeared jacket is laid out on the counter, and I’m clamping Jordan’s robe together so tightly at the neck, the thing might weld itself shut. “Gee, I don’t think I know anything about today’s plan.”

  Calvin rolls his eyes. “Stage management was supposed to visit you, already, but they’re probably too busy talking Nora out of killing Dewey.”

  This makes me laugh on accident.

  “Sorry, I shouldn’t have said that,” Calvin goes, but I can tell he’s not sorry at all. “So: You were just fitted for Jordan’s costumes, right?”

  I think back to Jordan in that zip-up sweatshirt, which couldn’t quite cover up his coffee spill. And . . . I think back to the glance I snuck of Jordan with his shirt off.

  If only he hadn’t mismanaged that carafe, he’d be here now.

  “Stay with me, Nate,” Calvin says. “Did you just hear what I said?”

  “Jordan. Costumes.”

  “Okay, but I went on. Listen up. Today is all about listening, buddy. So, this afternoon, we’re going to send you to music for an hour, to run all the songs. And they might lower a few of the keys. You know.”

  “Since Jordan’s voice is still an angel’s,” I nearly say, “and mine is lower than my Geometry scores.”

  Roscoe knocks and ducks his head in. “Hey, killer,” he says. Not sure if he’s kidding here; at any moment I expect him to say I’ve actually caused the death of Jordan. “Calvin, cut the pep talk.” Roscoe flips a laundry basket and sits with us. “We’ve rerouted the afternoon. The crew has agreed to giving you some tech-time onstage.”

  “Great,” Calvin says, clapping his hands together. “This is a good thing, Nate.”

  There is no mass of bullies more intimidating than a Broadway crew. But in a cool way.

  “Yippee,” I say, clearing a throat that hasn’t had a thing to drink today. My lips are so dry, if I smiled they’d probably split. Thank goodness I’m nowhere near smiling.

  “We need to run the bike-across-moon sequence,” Calvin says, checking off a list, “and we need to do the aerial dream ballet with Gertie—”

  “Oh my God!” I shout. “I’ve never been in the harness! I’ve never flown!”

  It’s true. There’s a whole dream sequence where Elliott and Gertie fly high above the audience, “out to search for their father” in the “great wide canyon of the world.” It’s superweird, and Jordan always looks like he’s going to pee his pants up there.

  Which I might just do here. “Um, I’m a teensy bit afraid of heigh—”

  “We’ve got to get him up there,” Calvin says.

  “Yeah, we know,” Roscoe says, licking crumbs from his moustache. That thing is like a lunch pail of future rewards. “We’re up against a lot here. Nate’s never flown. And he’s never lifted the E.T. body double out of the ditch. And he’s never stood on the desk in the frog sequence—”

  “He has, actually,” I hear, and we all turn to see Garret Charles and Monica, silhouetted in the door frame. “We created the frog sequence on Nate. In fact, he created it himself.” Garret glides into the room and stops inches away from Roscoe’s face (or whatever the British version of inches is). “You’re worrying the boy.”

  “I’m taking the boy through each step of the day,” Roscoe says, standing from the laundry basket.

  “Nate,” Calvin says, wiping his palms across a pretty fantastic pair of jeans. “Let me make sure about our errand. We’ll get a bag slipped onto your dressing table.”

  But he lingers, looking like he can’t quite leave me with these two goons.

  “Thanks, Calvin,” I say, giving him the thumbs-up and catching a whiff of myself. Eek.

  “Here is the plan for this evening,” Garret says, “since it appears the entire company is on different pages.” He crosses his arms, turning from Roscoe to begin a slow pace. “Monica is going to walk Nate’s track with him, backstage, for the entire show. She’ll shadow him.”

  “What are you talking about?” Roscoe says.

  “Listen, Roscoe.” Garret stops dead, his eyebrows narrowing into keyboard backslashes. “Let’s get serious. We all know that my team—”

  “The dance staff,” Monica says, her lipstick growing a shade darker.

  “Thank you,” Garret says in a “shut-up” kind of way. “The dance staff are the only ones who know the true inner workings of this show, Roscoe. Quick changes, exits. Onstage steps and backstage traffic.”

  “A new musical is the Holland Tunnel at rush hour during a presidential visit,” Monica offers, reminding me she’s from New Jersey and is thus to be both feared and revered.

  “I’d no sooner trust the stage managers to manage the preparations for Nate’s debut,” Garret says, funneling his voice into a pencil-sharp attack, “than I would with my own dry cleaning.”

  Here, Roscoe turns a fake-grape purple and offers no argument at all. And then, in a badly timed piece of poetry, Roscoe’s assistant Kiana pops her head in, pulls earbuds out, and actually says: “Wait! Is it true that Jordan Rylance is out tonight?”

  Roscoe shoos her away and whimpers slightly.

  “Monica will be in the wings to receive Nate, in between each scene,” Garret says, with real finality. “We’ve only time to get him into the emergency sequences today—the bike flight, et cetera, et cetera.”

  “I have the list of et cetera burned into my brain,” Monica says.

  (As if I don’t!)

  “Will we have access to Mackey this afternoon?” Garret asks. “Will Dewey’s magnificent casting choice of Mackey show up in the next hour, to walk any key sequences with Nate?” Finally, he’s letting Roscoe in on the planning. “Or has Mackey given up on rehearsing altogether?”

  Mackey is always claiming that he’s only got “one performance in him a day.” And that he doesn’t like to “waste it on practice.” Real video game mentality.

  “I can check with Mackey’s manager,” Roscoe says, pulli
ng out his phone. “But let’s not count on anything. Let’s . . . let’s plan on Asella walking Mackey’s role with Nate in rehearsal, today.”

  (You can’t make this stuff up!)

  “Nate!” Now Sammy the music assistant dashes in, his toothpick-arms spilling with loose sheet music. “Did you get the new lyric change in Act Two? It just went in yesterday.”

  “Yes, I—”

  But Sammy keeps shouting. Nobody ever takes a kid’s word. “So in ‘Best Friends For-Never,’ we literally changed it so that every time Elliott sings the phrase, ‘I’m not a scaredy-cat,’ he’s now going to sing—”

  “I’m no longer scared of that,” I say.

  “Yeah,” Sammy says, his lips racing so fast that the top one almost swallows the bottom. He drops the music to his sides. “Yeah, that’s right.”

  “Nate’s on it,” Aunt Heidi says, pushing past Sammy. My God, she’s back and holding flowers. What a lady. “Believe me, guys, he knows every lyric backward, forward, and loud. Nate, I tried to text Libby, but there’s no reception in the theater.”

  Garret stands. “Excuse me, folks. Could the boy have a little space in here?” Wow. “Five minutes,” he says to Roscoe. “In five minutes, we’ll see you in the wings, with the full company onstage, ready for Nate’s emergency put-in rehearsal.”

  Roscoe shrinks. God, this is like watching Sondheim get notes from Lloyd Webber.

  “We will run the bike sequence,” Garret says—for some reason taking the flowers from Heidi and inhaling deeply, as if for inspiration. “After that, we will move on to the E.T. body-double sequence.” Here, he massages his jaw and sucks air through some very off-white teeth. “And finally, the finale. And then Monica and I are going to have rice and spinach with the boy, and a tea, and take him through a cardio-yoga session. And only then will be on our way to our first preview.”

  But I sort of stopped listening after the letters F, I, N, A, L, and E.

  Oh my God, the finale. I don’t have to tap in the finale tonight. Or fake-tap. All I have to do is . . . take the last bow!

  “I’d offer some feedback on this plan,” says Roscoe, “but I have a feeling you’re not interested in my opinion, Garret.”

  “Don’t make me say it.”

  The room clears out, but I watch as Heidi and Calvin lock eyes and make their way to the hall together.

  (My work here is done.)

  “Oh!” Heidi yells at the last moment, turning back. “About those flowers.”

  Garret hands them back to her and then (seriously) grabs her shoulder and turns her away.

  “They’re stunning, Aunt Heidi!” They are.

  “They were just sitting by the stage door for you,” she says.

  Garret is now shutting the door in her face. “Flowers are bad luck,” he says to Heidi. “Pollen is ruinous in the lungs.”

  But it doesn’t matter, because my heart already took a photo of them.

  Those flowers are fancier than anything back home. There’s no roses or daffodils or anything people usually throw into an arrangement to glam it up but that just cheap it down. When you’re the kid of a flower-shop owner, you learn the tricks. And best of all? There was a single orchid popping its head out at the top, like when Ariel flips her hair in the “Part of Your World” reprise.

  “Break a leg, Natey!” Heidi yells, taking the flowers with her and following Calvin (!!!) downstairs. But I manage to swipe the note card that falls from the arrangement. “Your going to be amazing tonight,” it says, in Genna’s pretty pink writing, “even if the whole thing makes me sad.”

  And then, from the intercom: “Can we have the full company—and Nate Foster—to the stage.”

  “Shall we?” Garret says, reopening the door.

  Deep breath. Deep breath.

  “We shalleth,” I say, tying my robe tight. I slip my feet into Jordan’s slippers and start to follow Monica, but then something stops me. Or everything does. “You’re being nice to me,” my mouth says.

  “Come again?” Garret says, his forehead a knot.

  “No, it’s just. I sort of thought you guys hated me.” We start to walk downstairs. This will be easier to say if I’ve got the benefit of distraction on my side. “You put me on a diet. Poked me with your cane.” My eyes dart to Garret’s hand, but he’s caneless now. “Cut me from, like, every number.”

  Monica laughs. “You’re not a chorus boy, Nate.” We stop on the bend just before the last steps to the stage.

  “What my darling and talkative assistant means,” Garret says, “is that you aren’t particularly useful to a choreographer.” He pauses to consider. “You don’t know a time step from a toe shoe.”

  I’m about to protest—I do know the difference, intellectually—but Garret holds up his hand before I can speak. The company filters past us, dashing to the stage. To the drama. To slow down and watch my car crash.

  “And the point, Nate,” Garret says, “is that you gave a star audition. A bizarre, freakish, star audition. And this is—I hate to speak in clichés, being British, but—your moment.”

  And just before we walk onstage together, to a company of people gathered in a circle, Garret flips me around and bullets his eyes into mine.

  “There are people who wait their whole lives to star in a Broadway show.”

  “And never do,” Monica says, putting a hand on Garret’s shoulder.

  OMG. Of course. Garret never got to be a star. Finally, he knows a way to support me. Lopsided and offbeat. Me. My own kind of makeshift star.

  “Go out there for the whole world,” Monica says, speaking over a theater full of whispered chitchat. She fake-punches my chin. “No. Go out there for you.”

  “That’s right,” Garret says, truly smiling for the first time and ruffling my hair with his hand. “Go out there for you.” This must be what affection is. “But try not to get in anyone’s way. Or damage any set pieces.”

  And then the actors begin to clap for me—entrance applause like I’m a TV star and not that kid who cracked on the high note.

  And I walk into the center of their circle.

  And Genna’s blushing. And Asella’s smiling—and wearing E.T.’s bodysuit! We finally get to play out all our scenes onstage! And not in a salon!

  At least for today. At least for this moment. My moment.

  I’d raise my arms and grab my fists and punch the air in a rah-rah victory—like I’ve seen Anthony do before a big game—but I don’t want to kill anyone with my stench. And Calvin’s not back with my deodorant yet. So you know what I do?

  “We’ve gotta go out there tonight and show this audience we’re ready for the worst of them!”

  I talk, is what I do.

  And then I catch sight of Dewey in the upstage right corner of the stage, pacing underneath one of his million-dollar video screen sets. It dwarfs him.

  “And we’ve gotta go out there tonight,” I say, really shouting now, “and show this audience that . . . that . . .”

  Asella steps forward and takes my hand.

  “That Dewey has directed,” I say, “like, one heck of a show.”

  And before anyone can whoop or holler, Dewey looks up and nods at me and calls out in a voice tired and raw: “Thank you. Thank you so much, actually. Um. We haven’t got a moment to lose, folks. Get Jake on the bike.”

  And the entire company yells, “Nate!” just as Roscoe throws a harness at me.

  “Buckle up, buckeroo—we’re sending you to the moon.”

  Twitter Is Ablaze

  (After the show)

  They laughed. I know they laughed. That’s the only thing I’m certain of.

  I’m pretty sure I forgot the lyrics to one part, and just went “Bum-bum-bum” for a little while, until the conductor fed the words to me by hollering over the trumpets.

  I’m nearly certain that Mackey sweats a lot, because we quick-changed next to each other in the wings tonight before the finale, and the guy was dripping.

  And I’m
positive that Genna doesn’t make eye contact onstage. (I wondered throughout rehearsals if Dewey would ever give her that note—to stop looking at the mirrors and to start looking at her other boyfriend, Jordan—but I guess he never got around to it.)

  And I guess I’m also sure that to take the final bow—to walk out on two trembling legs that are attached to one body that’s finally realizing the hugeness of it all, like getting chosen first for basketball—has left me feeling sick with emotion. Diagnosis: happysadoverwhelmed. Treatment: Uncurable.

  The door pounds itself in.

  “Nate Foster!” they scream, crowding around me.

  Garret and Monica hold bubbly grape juice. Calvin, my hero, has a clipboard and a grin. And Nora Von Escrow is so done up she looks like a clown. But in a superpretty way.

  “Nate, Nate!” they sort of chant in a weird way that nobody commits to.

  “Everyone, everyone!” I shout back. “Was I okay?”

  (Oh. And I know that Mitchum works. First and foremost. That I put the stuff on three hours ago and I still smell like an atomic daisy.)

  “Were you o-kay?” Garret says, laughing a hoarse-throated cry.

  Roscoe rounds the bend with his team, all of them in black. Kiana has a balloon. “It was all we could find at the last minute,” she says, handing me a “Fifty and Fantastic” Mylar happy face.

  “Aw, that’s okay!” I yell. The whole thing is yells. “I feel about fifty years old tonight.” I mean that in the sense that my hips hurt so much from the harness.

  “You and me both, kid,” says one of the grown-ups.

  “Do you have notes for me?” I say, gulping from my last swig of pop. “You’ve always got notes for me.”

  I’m looking right at Monica, because she’s got critiques even when you don’t mess up—and I know I messed up the waltz tonight, going the wrong way and body-checking Mackey. And also, when Elliott’s bike lands in the forest, I hopped out before the E.T. body double was set up, so I knocked over a stagehand. Oh, and also—

  “No notes, no notes!” Monica says, looking genuinely embarrassed and sort of fanning her face like we’re on a porch. “We’re not doing feedback, now, Nate-o. We’re celebrating.”