She hurried out of the auditorium, leaving me alone with TJ while Mr. Ramsey went to get something from his office. TJ was sitting on the edge of the stage, so I went down the aisle and sat across from him in the front row. As far as I could tell, he wasn’t looking at me from behind his dark glasses, so I didn’t look at him even though I wanted to see what he really looked like. It’s bizzarro, I know, but until I got into a situation with people—like in the same class or assigned to a study group—I didn’t really notice much about them. It’s like when you go to the movies: you watch the stars, not the people sitting in the background drinking coffee or walking by on the street. So I had never really taken a good look at TJ before. He’d been a background person in my life until today.
Mr. Ramsey returned with two large envelopes and handed one to each of us. “You’ve both got great, challenging solos and duets, so we’re going to be seeing a lot of each other over the next seven weeks.” He turned to me and said, “With a voice like yours … do you read?”
I smirked. “Of course I read.”
“Great. That will make all our lives a lot easier. Take some time this weekend and go over the music. We’ll have our first private rehearsal Monday after school.” He gave a sort of stiff salute and took off, leaving TJ and me alone in the auditorium together.
I was about to leave when TJ jumped down from the stage and headed toward me. He stopped right in front of me and said, “Uh, hi.”
I said, “Hi.”
He said, “Nice to meet you.”
“Nice to meet you, too.”
We stood surrounded by an awkward silence for what seemed like forever before he said, “Did you, uh … Didja know the smallest monkey in the world is about as tall as a toothbrush?”
I stared at him for a moment, shook my head, and said, “Uh … what?”
He looked at his boots, shrugged, and said, “Right. Okay then. See ya.” And he took off up the aisle and out of the auditorium, leaving me completely confused-dot-com. What just happened? What did toothbrush-size monkeys have to do with anything? Was he trying to say I was short? Or looked like a freaky monkey? I decided to sit right back down where I was, skim the script, and make sure I had no kissing scenes with Mister Scary-Weird-Cute!
CHAPTER 11
Yo, Juliet!
It turns out I did have a kissing scene with TJ—or should I say Romeo? Only one kiss, but still, OMGZ! There was a scene where Romeo and Juliet fall in love singing a duet, and according to the script, they kiss as the lights fade to black.
How could Bob do this to me? Or any girl? Who would want to kiss a complete stranger in front of the whole entire school? We were only scheduled to do the show for one weekend—Friday and Saturday nights and Sunday afternoon. One kiss per show.… That meant three kisses! And that wasn’t counting rehearsals.
Thinking about it on the way home while gnawing on my bottom lip like it was hamburger (of course, I stopped when I realized no one would want to kiss hamburger lips), I recognized that after seven weeks of rehearsal, TJ and I wouldn’t be strangers anymore. We’d probably be friends. Maybe even good friends. And that might make it easier to kiss him, or worse.… What could be more embarrassing than kissing a boy who was your friend? That could make the friendship really awkward.
When I got home, Dada had taken Jasper out to the park, and Mom was huffing her way through Muscle Torture, so I went straight to my room and opened the envelope Mr. Ramsey had given me. There were five songs on sheet music. I got a sinking feeling when I remembered him asking, “Do you read?” He must have meant do I read music! Of course I don’t. This was going to make rehearsal even harder. I couldn’t learn any songs from dots sprinkled across pages full of lines.
On Saturday afternoon, the whole company gathered in Izzy’s basement to watch Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes in Romeo + Juliet. Before the movie started, Izzy called me up to her bedroom, where Boss Chloe and Braces Chloe were waiting. Izzy said in a very serious tone, “Sit down, Mango. We’ve got something heavy to tell you.”
I sat on the edge of the bed. “What? Did something happen?”
The girls turned to Boss Chloe, who shook her blue head mournfully, as if she were watching a casket being lowered into a grave. “I hate to tell you this, but the chirp on the street is that Brooklyn has left the building.”
“What building? She was here, in Izzy’s house?”
“No. She left Trueheart Middle School and transferred to Islington.”
I couldn’t believe it. Brooklyn transferred to the private school that was GOT’s biggest rival? “How do you know?”
Boss Chloe shrugged. “What can I say? My little birds…”
Izzy sat down next to me on the bed and took my hands into hers. “It’s factual. I saw Brooklyn and her mother drive by this morning with an Islington Superiors sticker on the back of their SUV.” She patted my hands. “We thought you should know, seeing as how you two were besties and all.”
Boss Chloe hiked up her blue cargo shorts and said, “Actually, her defecting is tragically delicious. You won’t have to worry about her spreading bad karma or playing dirty tricks on you anymore.”
I nodded, still trying to comprehend Brooklyn getting her parents to send her to private school because a trick she played on me backfired. I thought she was tougher than that, but I guess I really didn’t know her as well as I thought. From then on, I was going to be über careful about who I got close to and who I let get close to me.
Braces Chloe held out her phone to me. “On a brighter note, you’ve got over fifteen hundred hits on YouTube.”
Fifteen hundred? That means people have watched my audition more than one thousand times. That’s more people than I’ve ever spoken to in my entire life! I was almost semi-famous. Suddenly goose pimples were spreading all over my arms.
“This is epic,” Boss Chloe said. “What you need to do now is grow your fan base on Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, Facebook, and all the rest. I heard that colleges take how many followers you have into consideration for acceptance and scholarships.”
I said, “But I don’t have any of those!”
“Not even Facebook?”
Izzy said, “It’s not her fault. She doesn’t have a phone, and her parents are kind of social media–phobes.”
I nodded; it was true, although I didn’t want the world to know.
Boss Chloe winced. “Ouch! Dude, you’re in Social Siberia. That stinks.” She shook her head, pacing while looking down at the floor. “How am I s’posed to text you about rehearsals and last-minute schedule changes?”
Izzy stepped forward. “Send them to me, boss. I’ll make sure she’s up to date.”
“Thanks, Izzy.” I was grateful but embarrassed for feeling like the other girls were pitying me. Even as a Dramanerd star, I was an oddball because I didn’t have a phone.
Izzy patted me on the back. “Let’s go to the basement and start the movie. We’ve got popcorn, juice, and hot herbal tea—in case your voice is getting tired from learning your songs.”
As we headed down to the basement, I asked for a tea so everyone would think I was rehearsing my songs, even though I really had no idea how to start and was too ashamed to ask for help.
Izzy’s basement had the biggest flat-screen TV I had ever seen. TJ and a bunch of the Downbeats were on couches, so I slumped onto a beanbag way on the other side of the room. The movie was surprisingly good, but it was so embarrassing every time Romeo and Juliet kissed. Everyone would whoop it up, looking back and forth between me and TJ on opposite sides of the basement. I don’t know about him, but I kept staring straight ahead at the screen, pretending to be totally absorbed by the movie. In reality, my head was throbbing thinking about the kissing and how dumb I felt about not being able to read music.
After the movie was over, most of the cast stayed to hang out with Izzy. I wanted to stick around, too. Everyone was so nice, and I was having more fun than I’d had since my friend-life was all about Brooklyn,
but I had to get home by five o’clock. Mom and Dada were going to stop by a few restaurants and eat appetizers while checking to see if there were any openings in the kitchens, which was way cooler than Dada just showing up and handing them his résumé.
As I was leaving the basement, TJ was heading back downstairs. We nodded as we passed each other, and for a brief second I thought I had made a clean getaway, but he called to me from the bottom of the stairs. “How’d you like the songs?”
“The songs?”
“Yeah. I was playing around with them on my keyboard. They’re pretty tight, I mean, for pop/rock songs, right?”
Since I couldn’t read music and had no idea what the songs were like, I lied. “Oh, yeah. Awesome!” What else could I do? I was a musically illiterate twit staring down at a scary-weird-cute guy, whom I just realized had kiwi-green eyes.
Ugh, I love kiwi.
“Which is your favorite?”
“Uhhhh … ummmm …” I ransacked my brain trying to remember a song title and blurted out the first one that came to my head. “‘Looking Up at Love’! That song really fits my voice well. I can’t wait to sing it with the band and everything.…”
“Really?”
“Yeah. I’m working on the words and melody and, you know … the beat and stuff already.”
He stared up at me for what felt like a half a minute. The kids back in the basement were laughing at something, and I kind of got the idea it was me they were laughing at even though the thought was ridiculous—there was no way they could hear me lying to TJ on the staircase. Then I swallowed and realized the hot tea tasted like licorice, which I loved, especially the little piece of licorice in Good & Plenty candy, so I’d have to ask Mom to buy some.… Just before my brain whirled off to some other random thought, TJ said, “You know, there was this chicken once, I think his name was Mike, and he lived for eighteen months without a head.”
I said, “Uhhhhhh. Okay.”
TJ shrugged, turned, and headed into the basement without another word. So I continued up the stairs, out of the house, and walked down the block, wondering if this scary-weird-cute-kiwi-green-eyed guy was trying to say I was a chicken with her head cut off!
My actual salvation came the next morning while I was sitting at my desk highlighting my script. All the kids in the cast were highlighting their scripts when we were at Izzy’s, so I got out my lavender highlighter and went through my script highlighting all the lines. I wasn’t sure why they did this. Maybe because it made the script look more colorful and that could help with your acting?
I was almost at the end of my lavender script when Mom came into my room saying, “Something strange just happened.”
“What?”
“Well …” She looked at me quizzically and said, “There was a knock at the door. I went to open it and no one was there. But this envelope with your name on it was on the welcome mat.”
I agreed; that was strange. Then my turbo-psycho imagination kicked in. Could it be a letter bomb? Or maybe it was filled with anthrax, that powder poison that can kill you just by touching your skin. I got up from my chair and backed away from Mom. “Quick, throw it out the window and call 9-1-1. It could be dangerous. Lethal!”
“Lethal? Don’t be silly, Mango. Who would want to kill you?”
Hmm … That was something to think about. For starters, I wouldn’t have been surprised if Brooklyn had put a hit out on me since it turned out the joke was on her when I won the lead in the musical and because my success had caused a riftin her wicked fiendship with Hailey Joanne. Yep. Brooklyn could possibly be out to get me. I said, “Hold the envelope up so I can see the handwriting.”
Mom rolled her eyes as she held up the envelope. Nope. It wasn’t Brooklyn. Not her handwriting. I sighed and started toward Mom but stopped, thinking Brooklyn could have hired an assassin to write my name just to throw me off.
“Mango …” Mom’s lips twisted impatiently. “Are you going to open this thing or not?”
“Okay. Okay …” I took the envelope. It was very light and flat. Nobody could make a bomb that small. I ran my hands over it, trying to identify the contents. There was something in there about the size of a tube of lipstick but flat. Weird. I sniffed the envelope very tentatively. Nothing smelled like poison—whatever poison smelled like. As I held the envelope up to the light, Mom snatched it out of my hand.
“Enough!” She ripped the envelope open, and a zip drive fell onto the floor. I ducked behind my bed. “Mango, stop being so silly. Slide it into the laptop and see what’s on it.”
I stood and picked it up with the tip of two fingers, holding it as far away from my body as possible. Just before inserting it into the laptop, I asked, “What if it has a virus?”
Mom threw her hands into the air, sighed, and headed out of the room. “I give up. Do what you want with it. I’m through.”
I sat staring at the zip drive in my hand for the longest time before finally inserting it into the computer. I rolled away from the desk, expecting a horrific skull and crossbones to appear on the screen, glaring as the virus ate all of my Beyoncé albums and destroyed my hard drive.
But none of that happened. Instead, a file appeared. It was titled “Yo, Juliet/Scratch Tracks.”
I clicked it open. In it were all of the songs Mr. Ramsey had sent home with me but on MP3 files. I opened the first one: “Duet Forever.” A piano played, and I heard TJ’s voice singing. He sounded great, but I kind of giggled when he sang my part, because when he sang in a high falsetto, his voice would crack. I hoped that wasn’t the way I sounded to him. Then I realized he’d never heard me sing—well unless he’d seen the video on YouTube, which now had over twenty-eight hundred hits and a ton of comments, really positive ones. I wondered who these people were and wished I could thank every one of them.
I spent the rest of the afternoon listening to all the songs. TJ must have figured out that I couldn’t read music, because the song I said was my favorite—the one I “couldn’t wait to sing”—was Romeo’s solo! Great. Now he probably saw me as a music illiterate and a bad liar. So why did he go out of his way to help me?
After dinner, I worked on learning the songs. At least, I tried, but my mind kept wandering off to TJ, wondering why he recorded the songs for me and thinking about how it was such a sweet thing to do. It was getting easier and easier to imagine him as Romeo.
At our first rehearsal, the cast sat crisscross-applesauce on the stage floor in a large circle and read the script out loud. I wish Izzy had warned me about this, because I was totally unprepared to say things like, “Baby, you’re the most beautiful boy in the world to me,” or “I’ve never felt love like this before,” or worst of all, “Yo, Romeo, what are you waiting for? Kiss me!” I was probably as purple as a plum.
My biggest problem during the read-through was that I could barely be heard. Bob kept asking me to “project” and “share my voice.” I tried, but since he had to keep repeating himself, I don’t think I was making much progress. Izzy had no problem projecting. People in Timbuktu could probably hear her lines. Now, my singing voice was very loud, so I just had to figure out a way to speak from the same place I sang from—another thing I had to work on in addition to learning lines, songs, and how to act. Thank goodness there wasn’t much spoken dialogue in the play (most of it was in song), so the read-through wound up being pretty short.
Bob started “blocking” the first act. Izzy explained that blocking was mapping out where everyone would stand and move during a scene. She showed me a cool shortcut way to mark it in my script with a pencil so I could keep up with Bob and all the changes he kept making.
However, when Izzy saw my script and how lavender it all was, she whispered, “Girl, you’re only supposed to highlight your lines, not everyone’s lines and all the stage directions.”
I would have felt completely humiliated if she hadn’t whispered, keeping it private between us. Still, I held my script close to my chest, hoping no one else saw how
green I was.
Izzy was kind and thoughtful and did her best to encourage me throughout the rehearsal. I wondered how we had lost touch after kindergarten. She was the kind of friend a girl like me needed. I promised myself I would be as good a friend to Izzy as she was to me. Maybe we’d become besties one day, but I was determined to take it slow.
About an hour into blocking, Boss Chloe sent TJ and me to the music room to work with Mr. Ramsey on our first duet. On the way down the staircase, I got up the courage to thank him for the scratch tracks. He nodded and smiled. It became clear to me that this scary-weird-cute-kiwi-green-eyed guy was probably just as shy as I was. That helped me relax a little.
At the door to the music room, TJ asked, “Did you work on the songs?”
I smiled. “Yes. Constantly.”
“Cool. So, there’s no need to tell Ramsey you don’t read music. He’s a real snob when it comes to musicianship. If you don’t know the melody, fake it.”
“I will. Thanks.”
The hardest part of our first music rehearsal was trying to stop my hands from shaking while holding the sheet music. But I was grateful to have the music to glance at as an excuse not to look at TJ. Mr. Ramsey was encouraging us to sing to each other—after all, it was a duet, and we were supposed to act like we were falling in love. Still, even though I had memorized most of the words to this song over the weekend, I kept my eyes on the page. I wasn’t ready to look at TJ, or any boy, with “lovey-dovey eyes.”
After rehearsal, I met up with Izzy. We were now “walk home” buddies. We had a lot to talk about; mostly about the show and who was bonding with whom in the cast. We weren’t yet at the point where we talked for hours on the phone. I was still taking my time, letting our friendship develop. But I could see us burning up the phone lines in the near future.
Izzy came with me to my locker, where I was stunned and a little bit scared to see Hailey Joanne. Her back was to me, and she was on her phone, but she was definitely leaning on my locker. I stopped in my tracks and actually gulped. Izzy nudged me forward. “Don’t let her see you sweat. Remember, you’re the star now.”
Mango Delight Page 8
