Larger-Than-Life Lara

by Dandi Daley Mackall

  There was a long way to go to get to me. I tried to say the lines to myself for practice, when kids said them to each other onstage. Only that didn’t work good, because the lines in my head rolled, and theirs didn’t.

  As the girls’ names got closer to the Gs, my stomach started feeling like Eric Radabaugh was running around in there.

  “Paul Peterson and Laney Grafton,” Mrs. Smith announced.

  My legs felt cold and tingly as I climbed up to the stage, and I don’t think it was because I’d been sitting on them. Paul Peterson was in Ms. Connolly’s room, and he was one of the most popular boys in that room. So that didn’t help either.

  We had to stand on the front part of the stage, where you could see kids staring at you. I think I saw Lara sitting in her chair. But I’m not too sure about that. And the truth of it is that I’m not too sure about anything that happened next. I know Paul said his Tom line. And I think there was this long wait while my mouth caught up to my brain. Then I heard that not-rhyming poem song Lara had made out of Adeline’s words, and I said that. Paul said his. I said mine. Tom said his. Adeline said hers. And we were done.

  I remember thinking that I must have done all right because nobody was laughing at me or calling me a hillbilly name or anything. Not that I could have heard them anyway. My heart was pounding like my biggest big brother, Robert’s, radio before our daddy gets home.

  Other kids got up onstage and down offstage. But I was still out in that boat on the ocean, with the waves rocking me back and forth.

  We had girl As and boy Zs (David Zeller) read their parts. I figured we must be done.

  Ms. Connolly must have figured the same thing. “Well, that’s wonderful! You should all be very proud of yourselves today.”

  Mrs. Smith came up to her and touched her arm. Then she stood on tiptoes to talk into her ear. Ms. Connolly looked troubled.

  Then Mrs. Smith turned to us on the gym floor and said, “Everybody, stay seated, please. We’re not finished yet. We have one more tryout for the part of Adeline. Lara Phelps. Lara, would you come up here, please? And I apologize for not having you on our list. We were going from our old roster.”

  Every head turned to watch Lara, as she shuffled all the way around the crowd on the floor to get to the stage. I was pretty sure those steps weren’t going to be easy on her, and I was right. There were only three steps going up to the stage, but they were big steps.

  “Since all the boys have tried out for Tom’s part already, do I have a volunteer to read the lines with Lara?” Mrs. Smith asked.

  Wayne laughed. Loud.

  Mrs. Smith cleared her throat. “It would be a good opportunity to get a second chance at the tryout, in case you didn’t like your first attempt.”

  Nobody raised his hand.

  Joey Gilbert was sitting behind me. I heard him tell Eric, who really could have used a second chance, “Don’t you dare raise that hand, Radabaugh! You do, and you’ll be sorry.”

  “Well . . .” Mrs. Smith turned to Ms. Connolly. “I guess I could read Tom’s part.”

  “That’s okay.” Lara had finally gotten herself to the stage. She was breathing hard. But she didn’t look scared or anything, and I think the breathing hard was on account of the three steps.

  She shuffled toward us, so that she was right on the edge of the stage, looking out.

  Behind her, Mrs. Smith said, “But Lara, you need someone to read Tom’s lines.”

  “It’s okay, Mrs. Smith. Thank you.” She smiled at the teachers, then smiled at us. Then she turned her head one way and asked, “What’s the matter with you?”

  She turned her head the other way, and in this soft voice said, “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.”

  She turned back and lowered her voice. “What? I don’t know what you’re talking about, Adeline.”

  And she went on like that, saying both parts, making us believe she was both Adeline and Tom. Making us believe we were at the fair and didn’t want nothing except for Adeline and Tom to get together for that Ferris wheel ride.

  When she was done, I had to stop myself from clapping. Nobody clapped. But nobody called her a fat pig either. And every kid in the whole fourth grade had paid attention.

  Lara Phelps crossed the stage and waddled down the steps and back to her chair before the teachers said anything.

  Then Mrs. Smith broke out into a big smile. “Well. That was . . . amazing. I don’t think there’s any doubt who’s earned the part of Adeline here today. I think I can speak for both fourth-grade teachers when I say the lead role in Fair Day goes to . . .”[1]

  12

  “WAIT A MINUTE, Mrs. Smith,” Ms. Connolly interrupted. “I think we need to confer and select all the roles together, as we planned. Don’t you?”

  “Well . . .” Mrs. Smith began.

  Ms. Connolly took over again and talked to us kids, who were back to sounding like locusts. “We’ll have the results of the tryouts printed up for you tomorrow. We’ll post the roles and actors and actresses outside each of the fourth-grade rooms, as well as the names of set designers and stage managers, which are also very important roles in our production. Let’s keep it down as we go back to our rooms!”

  The school bell rang, which meant we were done with school.

  “And again!” Ms. Connolly shouted. “Thank you all for coming! You’re all winners! Quietly, boys and girls!”

  So we didn’t find out who got to be what in our play that Thursday. And maybe that was the beginning of the twist. Mrs. Smith says a plot twist is when you expect something to happen, but something else happens instead. And that is what happened when we got to school on Friday.

  Here is what I expected, and I think most kids expected:

  Lara Phelps would win the part of Adeline.

  Some kids maybe even thought she would win the Tom part too on account of her having read his part better than Paul or Carlos or T. J. But I didn’t think this, because it would be too hard for her to kiss herself in the end of the story and take a stuffed bear from her own self and walk off toward the Ferris wheel, hand in hand, when they were both her hands.

  Whoever ended up playing Tom was going to raise a big, fat stink about having to pretend to be in love with big, fat Lara.

  There would be a lot of crying by the girls who didn’t win.

  There would be a lot of yelling by the teachers who wanted us to believe that all of the parts were important and we shouldn’t feel bad about drawing the background scenery.

  There would be a lot of laughing at everybody from Wayne Wilson.

  Joey Gilbert would say that everything was “No fair!”

  There was one more thing I expected, but I didn’t put it on my expected list for two reasons. One, it is about me, and I’m just a minor character. And two, I’m not sure if it was an expected thing or more like a big, fat hope. I thought I maybe would get a part in the play for real. And I knew it would be because of Lara Phelps and the way she divided up the lines and turned them into a poem song that didn’t rhyme.

  Friday morning, everybody who could showed up early for class. I thought I would be the first one there, but I was number seven.

  Sara Rivers was the first one I heard. She was standing with the other kids, who were pushing at each other to read the tryout lists. “I won!” Sara shouted. “I can’t believe it! I’m Adeline!”

  So that was the first plot twist. Because although Sara was probably the second best, she wasn’t as good as Lara was. Amanda and Ashley and some of the other girls—Maddie Simpson was not there yet—were acting all excited for Sara. Ashley cried, “Oh, I just knew you’d get it, Sara!”

  Only she couldn’t have. Nobody could have known that. It was a twist.

  I saw Maddie trotting up the hall. You could tell that she thought she was going to see her own name as the star on that list.

  “Here she comes,” Becca whispered. She and Maddie
had been best friends in third grade. So she knew enough about Maddie Simpson to know what was coming was not going to be good.

  Sara waved at Maddie. The pinkish color went out of her cheeks. “Maddie, I—I mean, I’m sorry—”

  Wayne laughed. “You didn’t get the part, Maddie!” he shouted. “Sara did!”

  “What?” Maddie looked like she couldn’t believe this twist in her plans. “Where?”

  The crowd parted so she could pass through to the tryout sheets. She stood there reading those names. She could have read the whole entire dictionary during the time she read those names. Finally, she said, “This can’t be right.” Without a word to her best friend, Sara, she stormed into our classroom, shouting out, “Mrs. Smith!”

  I walked up to the lists. Nobody seemed to notice I was there. I read Sara’s name next to “Adeline.” So I saw that for myself. Carlos’s name was next to “Tom.” This was not as big of a twist because Carlos was the best of the boys in the boy part.

  Then I saw my own name.

  Now I got to admit that early on in this chapter I talked big. I learned this from my brothers. All of them. I said I expected to get a part in the play. But the truth is that I was hoping so hard, it just felt like expecting. And by the time I got home, it was back to just hoping, without any expecting mixed in. And by the time I went to bed, there wasn’t even much hoping left. And when I got up this morning, I was expecting again. Only this time, I was expecting not to get a part in the play because I should have known, like my daddy knows, that Graftons don’t get parts in plays.

  Only get this. I got a part.

  Next to Laney Grafton was “Caroline.” I remembered that part from when Mrs. Smith read the whole play to us. Caroline is a girl who brings her pigs to the fair to be judged. Only she doesn’t want them to win after all because that means her dad would kill them all dead, and she thinks this one is really a pet. Anyway, she was in the play a whole lot and had a lot of lines. Maybe next to Adeline and Elizabeth, Caroline said more than any other girl in the whole entire play.

  So that was really a twist because I didn’t think I would ever really get that part.

  More kids came and crowded around the tryout list. Some girls started crying because they didn’t get parts. And this was no twist because it’s what I thought would happen. The boys didn’t cry. But they put up a big stink.

  “Hey! That’s no fair!” Joey Gilbert shouted. He’d marched straight off his bus and shoved his way to the front of the crowd. “I don’t want to be a spitting, crummy scenery guy!” But he didn’t raise as big a stink as he would have if he’d gotten Tom’s part and Lara had gotten Adeline’s.

  Which brings me back to the biggest twist. Lara’s name was not next to any of the characters in the whole play. She did not win a single part. Instead, she was on the bottom sheet with kids like Eric Radabaugh and Wayne Wilson and unnamed boys and girls from Ms. Connolly’s class. They were all lumped together under “Stage Crew.”

  I ducked out of the crowd and went into my classroom. Carly and Stephanie were crying together on one side of the room. Lara was sitting behind her desk on the other side of the room, not smiling, and Mrs. Smith looked like she was talking important things to her.

  But Maddie wouldn’t let that happen. “Why didn’t I get to be Adeline? Everybody said I should be! You just ask them. I don’t want to be Elizabeth!”

  “Stop shouting, Maddie,” Mrs. Smith said.

  “I won’t stop! And my parents are going to be really mad when they hear about this. This is so not fair!”

  “The only not-fair thing is that Lara didn’t win.” I was the one who said this, which was a twist on me because I never ever mess in trouble that’s not any of my business.

  Mrs. Smith and Maddie turned to look at me. They looked as surprised to hear me say this as I was to hear me say this.

  Mrs. Smith’s face looked like she slept in it. It was the most wrinkliest I’d ever seen it. “Laney,” she began, “I was just trying to explain how we arrived at this decision. Lara absolutely did the best at tryout. I don’t think there’s any doubt about that.”

  “Hey!” Maddie interrupted. “Wait just a darn minute!”

  “Maddie, please!” Mrs. Smith snapped. “Take your seat.” Maddie spun on her heels and huffed back to her desk. Mrs. Smith went on. “Ms. Connolly felt Lara was just too new to Paris. Neither of us has heard her sing. And then there’s the entire cast to consider. Who will work well with whom . . . well, it’s really quite complicated. I know it might not seem—” She broke off here, and her voice cracked. She swallowed hard, and her eyes got all watery.

  Then that thing happened again. Lara got her smile back, and this is what she said to Mrs. Smith:

  “Mrs. Smith, it’s all okay.

  Please don’t worry for this play.

  Things can always work out best,

  Sometimes life is just a test.

  I can understand—you bet!

  Besides, I’ll like to work on set.”

  And that was the last real twist. Because there was Lara Phelps and Mrs. Smith. But instead of Lara crying and the teacher trying to make her feel better, it was twisted the other way around.

  13

  THE NEXT THREE WEEKS at Paris Elementary were full up with regular school stuff, plus the play. At my house, it took some very good acting for me to keep going to practices. And another thing was that my littlest big brother, Luke, never said what had made him cry that day. In fact, he didn’t say nothing. He stopped talking altogether, as far as I could see.

  Robert and Matt never noticed. I said something to Daddy about it one night, but he told me to worry about my own business. So you’d think that having one of my three brothers not talking or calling me mean names would have been a good thing. But it didn’t feel like it was a good thing.

  Three weeks is a whole long time to cover when you’re writing a book, unless it’s a book that goes on and on about a person’s whole entire life, which this book does not. If I told you about every single play practice, and every single meanness done to Lara, or every single fight my two talking brothers got themselves into, this part of the book could be really boring, which I don’t want to happen.

  Mrs. Smith says you can’t never write about every single thing that happens. So what you got to do is pick the right details that give the best picture. “Details, details, details!” That’s Mrs. Smith’s battle cry.

  There is an example about details that has to do with the play, Fair Day. And so I will use that. Joey Gilbert really got into painting the scenery and background decoration stuff, once he stopped saying “Unfair!” to everything. Only he was trying to draw and paint a whole entire fairgrounds, including stuff like a green field and empty animal pens and the road in front of the fairgrounds and the places between the chicken barn and the rabbit cages.

  So Mrs. Smith said, “Joey, these are wonderful paintings. But we just need the details of our setting. If you give us a Ferris wheel, a roller coaster, one or two games, like the balloon dart game, and a couple of other details, the audience will fill in the rest.”

  And I thought that was very good advice.

  So I will give you some details of the three weeks we practiced for our play. Only this is harder than you might think. So I’m doing what Mrs. Smith made us do when we started studying details. We did two exercises that lasted one day for each exercise. And this was the first one: tell about your day, but you can only use verbs, which are action words.

  Here is my three weeks from the time I got my part in the play to the day of the play:

  Me in My Class

  tried (to listen)

  fell (asleep)

  failed (a test)

  shut (up)

  shouted (at Joey)

  watched (Lara)

  wrote (some of this)

  divided (up Caroline’s lines in the play)

  memorized

  Other People in My Class

  laughed


  made fun

  poked

  whispered

  pointed

  practiced

  griped

  drew (on big poster board)

  blew up (balloons)

  built

  painted

  talked (to each other)

  Larger-Than-Life Lara

  smiled

  helped

  suggested

  worked

  carried

  complimented

  hummed

  shuffled

  ate (alone)

  sat (alone)

  smiled

  People in My House

  yelled

  cursed

  fought (over TV)

  hit

  hit back

  shoved

  slammed

  shouted

  complained

  threatened

  kicked

  dodged

  fought (over bathroom)

  punched

  punched back

  swore

  left

  The second exercise Mrs. Smith made us do so we would learn about details was very much like that first exercise, only you could only use nouns. Nouns are names of things that are people, places, or things. Only I’m not going to do so much with this exercise for these reasons. First, I ended up writing down a lot of details in verbs and that took up a lot of space in this chapter. Second, I don’t want it to be boring, going over the same thing. Third, I’m tired of these exercises.

  So here are the three weeks of nouns:

  Lara

  Joey Gilbert

  (All the other nouns that are names of people I already told you about, I won’t put here. Just so you know, these nouns are called “proper” and they have capital letters on them.)

  Paris Elementary

  desk

  pencil