Larger-Than-Life Lara

by Dandi Daley Mackall

  So it took me a very long time to get it. Suspense really means that you’re kind of afraid because you don’t know what’s going to happen, but you know that nine times out of ten it’s going to be a bad thing.

  Like when I ended that last chapter like this: “Sometimes it seemed like Joey Gilbert was one big conflict waiting to happen. We didn’t have to wait long.” I’ll bet you weren’t thinking that a good thing was going to happen. You knew that something bad was coming. That’s suspense.

  But it’s not going to happen in this chapter, so you can relax.

  Now I’m back to the place where I ought to be in the story, and it’s Wednesday. On Wednesday, Mrs. Smith finished up reading the whole entire Fair Day play to us. It was a pretty good play, and it even had some suspense, although none of the scary suspense. Most of the boys would have liked it better if it’d had scary suspense. Especially Joey Gilbert, who kept saying stuff like “This is boring!” and “That’s stupid!”

  At the end of the play, all the characters are onstage. It’s this big fair. And Tom asks Adeline to ride the Ferris wheel with him. And he gives her this stuffed bear he won by busting balloons with darts. She finally says yes she will ride the Ferris wheel with him. And I have to admit that Joey was right about that part because it is kind of lame. But it’s also the place where there’s suspense because we don’t know if she’s going to forgive Tom for what she thought he did. It turns out he didn’t really do it, but her friend lied to her about it. But Adeline forgives Tom anyway, even though he really didn’t do anything, and she takes the bear and heads for the Ferris wheel with him. The end.

  Mrs. Smith didn’t ask us what part we wanted to try out for in the play. She’s pretty smart and probably knew we’d all want to be Adeline or Tom. So she and Ms. Connolly, the other fourth-grade teacher, had it worked out that we would all read Adeline’s or Tom’s part. Then they’d hear enough to know who should be those parts and who should be the other parts and who should stay back behind the stage and hang up scenery.

  Mrs. Smith passed out two pages of script to all of us. Every single one of us took the script, even Larger-Than-Life Lara. And even Joey Gilbert, who had griped all week about how stupid this was. The script looked like this:

  Tom: “What’s the matter with you?”

  Adeline: “Me? Nothing’s the matter with me. But I want you to know that I know what you and Elizabeth have been doing behind my back.”

  Tom: “What? I don’t know what you’re talking about, Adeline.”

  And that’s how it went, trading lines between those two main characters.

  “You’ll have tonight to work on your lines,” Mrs. Smith said. “Try to memorize them, as much as you can. I’ll give you class time today, too. Ms. Connolly’s class will be doing the same thing, and we’ll hold tryouts together tomorrow. She and I will assign the parts after tryouts. We only have three weeks to rehearse, to make our scenery, and to get the word out.”

  “Who’s going to come to our stupid play?” asked Joey.

  Wayne laughed.

  “The other elementary students, for one,” Mrs. Smith answered. “Also your parents and brothers and sisters and grandparents.”

  I knew my brothers wouldn’t come to the play if I promised to make their beds for a year. I would have liked for my daddy to see me onstage and maybe get the idea for himself that I would be a good actress when I got out of school. But I didn’t know if he’d come either.

  For the rest of the day, we were supposed to pair off with a partner and practice learning our lines for the tryouts. I hate when we pair off with partners because unless Theresa and Amanda are mad at each other, I never have anybody to be a partner with. And they weren’t mad at each other.

  I watched the other kids trade desks and divide up like Noah’s ark animals, two by two. Then I saw that Lara and I were the only unpartnered girls, and Eric was the only boy by himself.

  “Hey! Hillbilly face!” Eric shouted, dancing up to me. “Practice with me!”

  Normally, I would have told Eric to shut his face, and maybe some other things that wouldn’t have made it into this book. But seeing’s how my only other choice was Lara, I said, “Okay, rat breath.”

  Eric tried to sit on the floor beside my desk, but he couldn’t keep still.

  “What’s the matter with you?” he asked, his voice sounding funny, like a hammer hitting wood.

  “Nothing,” I snapped, thinking he was making fun because maybe I looked as nervous as I was. “What’s wrong with you?”

  “That’s the first line, dumbhead,” Eric explained.

  I looked at my script. “Oh yeah.” Then I read Adeline’s first line: “Me? Nothing’s the matter with me. But I want you to know that I know what you and Elizabeth have been doing behind my back.”

  All around the room, I heard the exact same words being said by different voices. It made me think of what an echo in a fun house might sound like.

  Eric read Tom’s next line. He was a pretty bad reader, which I already knew from when we had reading class. When he said Tom’s words, all the words had the same loudness, kind of like a robot.

  I went on with the rest of the script, all about how Adeline, which was me, thought Tom, which was Eric, was cheating on her with Elizabeth, because Elizabeth had told Adeline that Tom wanted to ride the rides with her, that is, Elizabeth.

  “This is so lame!” Eric complained.

  “Shut up and read your lines,” I said.

  “I need to go to the bathroom.”

  Eric went to the bathroom.

  I glanced over at Lara. She was reading Mrs. Smith’s copy of the whole play. I figured she must have decided not to try out after all, which was probably a good decision because Joey wasn’t finished with his conflict.

  Eric came back from the bathroom. Then he went to the pencil sharpener. Then he went to see how Joey and Wayne were doing. Then he went to the pencil sharpener again.

  I was going to have to learn my lines all by myself when I got home, which I knew could be a big, fat problem.

  “What the deuce’s doggie do you think you’re up to?” My middle big brother, Matt, snuck up on me in the living room.

  I had come home to an empty house right after school and curled up on the living room couch to learn my lines. I was surprised to see how it was almost dark outside. That’s how hard I’d been trying to memorize, not that it had done me much good. Adeline’s words refused to stick to my brain.

  “Where’s Luke?” I asked, not answering Matt’s question on purpose because he could tear up a script faster than a math book. And it would matter more.

  “How the fiery blazes should I know?” Matt turned on the TV and headed for the couch.

  I escaped before he sat on top of me.

  I looked out the front window at the dark shadows over our lawn. Luke should have been home. I would have called Daddy, except for he should have been home too, and I didn’t know where to call him.

  I spent about fifteen minutes worrying before I saw Daddy’s truck drive up, and Luke got out. When they came in through the kitchen, Luke was crying, and Daddy was yelling at him.

  “You get on upstairs!” Daddy shouted. “And if I ever catch you doing that again, you won’t be able to get. You hear?”

  Luke ran by me, bumping into me in the doorway. He was still crying, and he didn’t look up at me.

  This is the kind of trouble I don’t mess in. So I can’t tell you what happened to Luke. Or why our daddy picked him up and brought him home late. And if that makes for suspense, then you should know straight up that you’re not going to find out in this book. And I’m just sorry about that. But that’s the way it is.

  Matt made himself scarce. In the kitchen, Daddy slammed things. Cupboards, fridge, drawers.

  I tiptoed up to my room and tried to memorize lines. But I might as well have been out hunting snipes. I fell asleep trying to learn Adeline.

  When I woke up, I still had my clothes on. My scr
ipt was wrinkled under one leg. I changed some of my clothes, washed up, grabbed my wrinkled script, and ran all the way to school in the dark before dawn.

  I have this secret place behind the school, outside the backstage door. Sometimes when Daddy’s been drinking, or Matt’s meaner than usual, I go there and do homework. Or not. Sometimes I just sit on the step and maybe think about being an actress and moving to New York City or Hollywood.

  That’s where I headed now—not New York City or Hollywood. My secret step. I needed to practice. Today was tryouts, the day when my whole future could get decided.

  I ran around behind the school and slipped past the big evergreen bush.

  In all my years at Paris Elementary, I never saw even one single person besides me sitting on that step. Only today there was. Larger-Than-Life Lara.

  I thought about turning around and looking for a new secret spot. But Lara must have seen me standing there. “Hi, Laney,” she said. “Want your spot back?”

  “How did you know—?” I started.

  She scooted over, like she was going to share my step with me. “Did you get your lines memorized?”

  I looked down at my script and shook my head. It made me mad to have her ask this. So I said, kind of mean-like, “Did you?” Because I had already figured that she quit, since she didn’t look at that script very long in our classroom.

  “I did,” Lara said.

  That surprised me. And if I didn’t want to put in one more cliché here, I would say that it took the wind out of my sails.

  “Could you use some last-minute help, Laney?” she asked.

  I wanted to scream at her that it wasn’t fair she could learn her lines so fast and I’d tried and tried and couldn’t remember any of them. I wanted to shove her face in, with that smile that was still there, when I couldn’t rightly remember the last time I’d smiled.

  She patted the step. “Come on. I’ll read Tom’s lines.”

  “Won’t do any good.” I sat on the very edge of my step, as far away from her as I could get and still be on that step. I looked around real quick to make sure nobody saw me sit next to Larger-Than-Life Lara. I knew that people like Maddie Simpson had to be careful who they sit themselves next to. Their reputations are at stake. And I almost understood why Maddie, in all the five years we went to school together, had never ever once sat herself next to me. What I hadn’t figured on before right then was that a person like me had to think about this same thing. And I didn’t like that feeling. But that was the way it was.

  Lara started right out. Without looking at a script, she said Tom’s line: “What’s the matter with you?”

  I closed my eyes and hoped that that overnight thing had happened to me, like when people say they slept on it and in the morning it came to them. I thought maybe that would happen to me. I had slept on that script. Maybe it had finally worked its way into my brain.

  “Nothing’s wrong . . . with me,” I said, as Adeline. But I knew that wasn’t exactly right. And worrying about what I left out kept me from remembering what came next.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” I said, as myself.

  Lara said the whole Adeline line, and she didn’t leave out anything. Then she said Tom’s next line, without looking at the script. And when I couldn’t come up with Adeline’s next words, she came up with those, too.

  “How do you do that?” I asked, so worked up I didn’t know whether to cry or scream my head off.

  Lara gave me that smile. “Think of it as a poem, Laney.”

  I got a little apprehension then, which means I got scared of what might be coming next. I thought she might whip out one of her poems on me, and who knows what she could say.

  Instead, she went on, “Not all poems rhyme. But they all have rhythm, and that’s what makes them easy to memorize. A long time ago, people sang history in ballads so ordinary people who couldn’t read could pass down that history.”

  I still didn’t know what this had to do with me getting Adeline’s words into my head. “So what?” I asked, again, kind of mean-like.

  “Listen to the lines, Laney,” she said. “Hear the rhythm.” She repeated the lines, the same lines I’d been pounding my brain to get into my head. But when she said the words, they came out different. They sounded more like music. Or a boat, rocking side to side in little waves on the ocean.

  “How did you do that?” I asked, when she’d done it to the whole entire tryout script, all by heart.

  “It’s easy. Look.” She took my wrinkled script and divided Adeline’s lines so it looked like this, for example:

  But I want / you to know / that I know /

  what you / and Eli / zabeth have / been doing /

  behind my back.

  Since you are just reading the words, you can’t hear them like I did. But take my word for it that those divided-up words made perfect sense when she was saying them in that rocking way. It made the lines sound like a song that’s got stuck in your head.

  So maybe that explains what happened next, because I can’t explain it in other ways. I read the lines like Lara had divided them up. Then she said Tom’s part. And when I got to Adeline’s next lines, I could say them without looking. It was like I could still hear them rocking. I could still hear Lara’s voice, hear it larger than life.

  By then it was full light. I heard a bus come up School Street, and I knew it was Joey Gilbert’s bus. And even though Lara had just helped me take the most biggest step toward my only dream in life, I hopped up off that step faster than bees sneeze. And I ran around the building, just as the bus was pulling up.

  But in the window of that bus, there was Joey Gilbert. He was frowning out at me. And for one terrible moment, I was sure he’d seen me and Larger-Than-Life Lara and that I wouldn’t never hear the end of it.

  11

  JOEY GILBERT DIDN’T SEE ME and Lara on the secret step.

  I let you think that he maybe did, because that’s a writing trick that Mrs. Smith taught us about. It’s called the “Cat in the Alley” trick. I love that, the “Cat in the Alley” name. But trick isn’t the right word, because it’s very fair to use it to get suspense when you tell a story.

  The way it works is this. You are inside the house at night. Somebody crazy is after you and has just given you a scary call on the telephone to tell you that he’s going to chop off your head. You decide to watch TV to take your mind off things. Then you hear a noise outside. You turn off the TV sound and listen to be sure. Then there’s that noise again. You get scareder and scareder. So you get you a weapon, like a broom or a bat, and you try to be brave. Slowly, you creep to the back door, where you heard the scary noise outside of. You slip out into the alley, with your broom or bat raised over your head. “I know you’re out there!” you cry, with a shaky voice because you’re so scared. “Come on out or I’m calling the police!” You hold your breath. The readers hold their breath.

  Then a cat comes out from behind the trash can.

  That is the “Cat in the Alley” trick. And if you keep reading that book for a few pages, that scary guy will probably come back for real. And this time, you will think it’s the cat, until the scary guy jumps out at you and really scares you to death.

  So Joey Gilbert didn’t see me sitting with Lara. But maybe he will next time.

  Or maybe not.

  I just thought I had to end that chapter, which was called “Suspense,” with something like the Cat in the Alley.

  Mrs. Smith tried to teach us science in the morning, but it wasn’t working for her. You would have thought she had herself one whole entire room full of Eric Radabaughs.

  Finally, it got to be time to have the tryouts. We followed each other down the hall, getting yelled at the whole way because we were poking each other and laughing and being loud, like we were all Wayne Wilson.

  Ms. Connolly’s room was just as bad, by the way.

  Our teachers herded us into the gym, which was also the stage for acting, depending on what you wanted it to be.
The whole fourth grade of Paris Elementary sat on the floor, close to the stage, except for that Lara got to sit in a folding chair behind us and so did the principal, who was just along to watch. We were as noisy as locusts.

  Mrs. Smith and Ms. Connolly climbed to the stage. Wayne laughed and yelled, “Bravo!” and started everybody, except the principal, clapping. It took them a couple of minutes to shut us up again.

  Ms. Connolly had the loudest teacher-voice, between her and Mrs. Smith, so she started.

  “Listen up, people! We better get started. We have a lot of people trying out here today. Now, we’ve heard all of you sing in music, so we won’t be having musical auditions per se. You have your lines. When we call your names, hurry up here onstage and perform the scene you’ve all been given.

  “So, let’s proceed. Mrs. Smith and I have decided that to be fair, we’ll start the boys alphabetically and the girls in reverse alphabetical order.”

  Seeing as how I’m a G, it didn’t matter that much to me, one way or the other.

  “No fair!” shouted Joey Gilbert, even though he’s also a G.

  You could tell our teachers had it all planned out. They called out, “Michael Adams,” from Ms. Connolly’s room, and “Delaney Wells,” from our room, and those two got to go up onstage first. It made me very glad that my name wasn’t Laney Zany or something.

  Michael and Delaney read Adeline’s and Tom’s speeches to each other. Then they sat down, and two more people got called up.

  It got pretty boring after a while. They all kind of sounded alike. Most of them sounded like Eric, with the words coming out like they were robots. Maddie Simpson tossed her wavy, blonde hair when she said her lines, and she stuck her tiny nose up in the air. So that was a little different than everybody else. But her words sounded the same. The only other different person was Sara Rivers. When she said Adeline’s lines, we all got really still. And I think it was because even though we’d heard the lines so much we wanted to hurl, still, Sara sounded like she was really Adeline and her feelings were really hurt by Tom, instead of by Travis Freeman, who was pretending to be Tom.