Even when we weren’t physically in the same room (which was rare), we were connected, texting or tweeting each other lyrics from the show:
“The carriage is waiting, we must be gone!”
“You can’t just sit here dreaming pretty dreams!”
“Go to the wood!”
With our phones we’d take abstract photos of things from rehearsal that were nearly impossible to identify, then post them on Instagram—a secret guessing game of sorts. My favorite picture was a close-up of our prop cow’s nostril that Jack took. I must have stared at it for at least twenty minutes before I figured out what it was.
And we’d leave voice-mail messages for each other in which we’d pretend to be Renee and give each other ridiculous notes, like when Jack left me this message:
“Hi, Louisa, it’s Renee. Listen, great stuff today, but I want to give you a couple things to think about for tomorrow’s rehearsal. This might sound crazy, but why don’t you try wearing some fake teeth? And maybe use a Russian accent?”
To which I responded:
“Hi, Jack, it’s Renee. Listen, you are doing some terrific work in the room, but may I suggest eating a lot of beans before our next rehearsal? It might connect you more to the magic beans in the story, and the gas you’ll get will only give you more layers to work with.”
• • •
At school, Jack skillfully maintained his low profile, and I continued to play along. That is, until the day Jenny got annoyed.
“Why didn’t you text me back last night?” she demanded one Friday before history. We were nearing the end of our third week of rehearsals, and I had not spent any time with her.
“I was in rehearsal until really late, Jenny, I’m sorry—” I began.
“This is like the fourth time it’s happened this week,” she said, accusingly.
“I’ve been so busy—”
“Whatever, Lou—I texted you at, like, eighty thirty, and then I saw you were tweeting at nine during your rehearsal to someone whose handle is @GetRichJack, so I know you had your phone on you.”
Oops.
“I’m really sorry—”
“Is @GetRichJack Jack?” Jenny asked, sliding into her desk behind me.
I took a deep breath, turned around in my seat, and leaned in close across her desk so only she could hear me.
“Yes,” I whispered.
Her eyes widened.
“Why are you tweeting Jack about Into the Woods? I thought he gave up theater.”
Jenny waited for a response, her lips pursed tight. She was clearly in no mood for apologies, and a lie would only make the situation worse, so I opted for the truth.
“He’s in the show with me.” I was speaking as quietly as I could. “He’s playing the role of Jack.”
Jenny scowled, piecing together recent events.
“Is that why he’s not on the soccer team?” she asked, getting louder. “It wasn’t because he ‘hurt his knee’?”
“Shh,” I said, looking around me, nervously. “His knee is fine. He just doesn’t want anyone to know about the show yet.”
Jenny squinted at me with suspicion. She did not like having secrets kept from her. Especially if they were mine.
“So, what’s the deal?” she asked, after a moment. “Is he, like, your boyfriend now?”
“No!” I hissed. “We’re just friends, I swear.”
“Well, lucky him,” Jenny said, her voice thick with sarcasm. “Does he know that the only reason you like him is because you’re obsessed with all things Broadway?” She was getting louder as my heart beat faster.
“That’s not true—”
“This is sort of perfect for you, right?” Jenny said, the anger rising in her voice. “If you can’t be on Broadway, then you’ll just kiss up to someone who has been.”
“Who’s been on Broadway?” Tanner Falzone’s gruff voice knocked the wind out of me like a blow to the chest. I turned to face him, my thoughts racing, and I heard Jenny’s barely audible, “Oh no . . .” An already unpleasant situation had just become much worse, as the very thing I had sworn to Jack I would protect was now dangling like a carrot in front of Tanner’s eager face. I prepared to answer his question by making up a distant cousin named Heidi who I only saw every other Thanksgiving, but suddenly the sound of Jack’s voice from the doorway, quiet but strong, surprised me once again:
“Me,” said Jack. “I’ve been on Broadway.”
–JACK–
What had I done? Everyone stared at me with the blankness of a thousand unfinished work sheets. Perhaps it was the confidence of a great week of rehearsal or perhaps it was not wanting to leave my friend (the only person who’d consistently been my cheerleader) hanging out to dry. Whatever caused my lips to utter these words didn’t matter at this point. All that was certain was my cover had been blown, and I’d been the one to do it.
“I’ve been,” I repeated. “I’m not a star or anything, but yes, I’ve been on Broadway.”
The room was so silent, I could hear the scratch of chalk on a blackboard from the room next door. I’d always heard confessing a secret felt like a weight being lifted off your shoulders. Right now it felt more like being bound into a life-size rubber-band ball. I braced for a spitball or apple core to blast me in the face, but what flew through the air was worse than anything that could have been thrown.
“That’s so gay,” Tanner grunted.
The word hung in the air like a bad smell. For such an obvious insult it still felt like a punch to the gut. I hated that word. Not for what it actually meant, but the power it seemed to give the person using it.
“Oh, grow up, Tanner,” a voice muttered from the clump of classmates.
Everyone turned in shock, looking to see who was stupid enough to talk back to the biggest kid in seventh grade. I knew immediately whose voice it was. Tanner jerked his head back and forth in disbelief.
“What did you say?” he growled at Lou.
“Yeah, grow up,” another voice chimed in. This voice I recognized as Jenny’s. “What have you done in your life that’s that impressive?” she challenged in a shaky, but piercing voice. “Other than the third grade . . . twice!”
“Oohhhhhhhh!” a chorus of classmates blasted out in unison.
I wasn’t sure whether to burst out laughing or run and hide in the bathroom. Tanner’s mouth hung open, his face turning hot-sauce red. I figured I’d better step in before things got too messy.
“Hey, it’s cool,” I said, entering the room. “Yeah, guys, I used to do theater. Still do, actually.” I nodded quickly to Jenny and Lou, a simultaneous thank you and I’ll take it from here. “But, Tanner”—I cleared my throat—“I’m sure there are a lot of things you can do that are really impressive.”
“Yeah, like destroy you and your little ballet friends,” Tanner snarled back at me.
Oh boy, I thought. My eyes darted to the doorway. Where the heck was Mrs. Lamon?
“I’m sure you could. No question about that.” I laughed nervously. This was a disaster. I’d gone from having my feelings hurt to fearing the actual possibility of broken bones. “Look, you’ve got your stuff. We’ve got ours. Isn’t it cool that we can all . . . get along?” I said, realizing how corny and Sesame Street my words sounded.
“What did you do on Broadway?” a boy’s voice called out from the group surrounding Tanner. It was Sebastian, an athletic kid I recognized from soccer tryouts. He was tall and popular and probably Coach Wilson’s first pick for the team. “Were you in Book of Mormon?”
Tanner turned to him in disgust as if asking What are you saying? We need to put this kid to shame.
“What?” Sebastian defended casually. “My dad took me to see that at Playhouse Square. It’s by the South Park guys.”
“No, I wasn’t in Book of Mormon,” I jumped in quickly,
seizing the opportunity to change the subject. “But, that’s cool your parents let you see it. Mine said I had to wait until I was in high school. On Broadway I was in . . .” Oh man, I thought. Why couldn’t I have been in a show that sounded really manly like Rocky or Jersey Boys or at least something without the word Mary in it? “Um, A Christmas Story and Mary . . . Poppins.”
“Shut up! I love Mary Poppins!” a pretty blond girl named Jessica chimed in. It was the first time I’d ever heard her speaking voice. “Did you get to ride up the banister?”
“No. Well, not during the show.” I shrugged. “But one of the stagehands let me ride it on my last day. It was pretty sweet.”
“It was pretty sweet,” Tanner repeated in a mocking high-pitched voice. This kid was ruthless.
“Make fun of him if you want,” Lou said, squeezing her way up to his desk, hands planted on her hips, “but when he was on Broadway, Jack was making more money . . . than your dad.”
Tanner looked to me and tensed his face. This is it, I thought. I should just surrender to two long years of swirlies and locker coffins. I wondered if my parents would actually consider moving back to New York if I came home with a black eye. “Is she for real?” Tanner asked me after a long silence.
“Um,” I murmured. “I’m not sure what your dad does. Probably something really fancy, but I guess I . . . did make a pretty big paycheck.”
Tanner’s eyes narrowed, sizing me up. “That is so”—he took in a deep breath, preparing his attack—“weird.”
Weird I could do. To be honest, I couldn’t agree more. As an actor you’re asked to dance across the stage singing in kooky costumes often wearing dead people’s hair. Not exactly a typical middle-school occurrence.
“So you got to spend all that money?” Sebastian asked, drifting away from the group of boys surrounding Tanner. Truthfully, I didn’t. My parents used some of it to pay our rent. Some of it went to my agent, and the rest they put in a bank account that I couldn’t touch until I went to college. At the end of the week I’d get an allowance of twenty dollars, which I’d usually spend on chips or candy or something sweet my parents never allowed in the house.
“Yep. I totally did.”
Okay, I lied a little.
“I was even going to buy a pool for my rooftop,” I continued. “But I decided they were too much work.”
Okay, maybe more than a little.
Hey, whatever! So my life in New York more closely resembled an average preteen’s than a rapper’s in a music video, but it couldn’t hurt to pretend. Lou looked at me inquisitively, as if asking Really?
Shh, I’ll tell you later, my eyes broadcasted back. She nodded knowingly. I could tell we’d been spending a lot of time together. You knew you had a good scene partner when they could read your mind with a single look.
“Sorry, class.” We heard Mrs. Lamon’s voice as she came tearing in from the hallway. Saved. “The copy machine was broken and started spewing out hundreds of pages of . . . You know what? It doesn’t matter. Can everyone take their seats and open your textbooks to page thirty-seven. The Boston Tea Party.”
• • •
After school when the bus pulled up in front of my house, Lou and I hopped out together. My mother was wearing her Christmas Story ball cap, pushing our brand-new lawn mower across the overgrown grass. Originally my parents intended for lawn duty to be a part of my weekly chores, but a guardian angel (in the form of a sales associate at Home Depot) warned against anyone under age fifteen operating the mower. My mom waved to us, wiping her forehead with her new gardening gloves.
“I’m just gonna walk Lou to her door,” I called out.
My mom nodded and started the mower up again.
“I’m sorry your secret got out,” Lou apologized, kicking a pebble down the sidewalk. “Jenny was the only person I told, and even she didn’t mean to let it slip. I was just being a bad friend to her, and then Tanner—”
“No, it’s fine,” I said, cutting her off. “I’m sure it would have gotten out eventually. It was stupid of me to try to keep it a secret in the first place.”
We walked slowly down the tree-lined sidewalk, past the lawn with the rosebushes and that creepy garden gnome. “All things considered, it could have gone worse.” Lou shrugged. “I mean, Jessica Wolfson acknowledged your existence. I’ve been in the same class as her since kindergarten, and I’m pretty sure she doesn’t even know my last name.”
“Yeah, it’s cool. I just wonder what the fallout’s gonna be with Tanner and his friends,” I said. “I might as well start ironing bull’s-eyes to the back of my shirts.”
“I bet he’s not going to mess with you,” Lou responded. “He usually only picks on the kids with lower self-esteem than him. You obviously have a lot to be proud of.”
I decided not to mention that being called gay in front of my entire class made me feel pretty small.
“Besides,” she continued, “he’s too afraid one of your big-shot New York people will slap him with a lawsuit something.”
I chuckled, getting a mental image of Davina in a judge’s robe with a powdered wig, banging that hammer thingy. Aw-duh in the Cawt! Aw-duh in the Cawt!
“Yeah, little does he know I still dig through couch cushions to find money to buy KitKats.”
We turned up the walkway to her house. “Well, I’ll see you soon,” I said, stopping just short of her doorstep. “And seriously, thank you for standing up for me. That was really nice of you.” I meant it.
She buried her fingers underneath the straps of her backpack.
“No one’s ever put themselves out there for me like that,” I said. “You’re a pretty cool girl.”
Lou smiled, and then to my surprise flung her arms around my shoulders, pulling me in for a hug. Her hair smelled nice, like apples. For a second all I could hear was the growl of our lawn mower humming in the distance. Suddenly, the sound cut out and was replaced by the bark of my mom’s voice two houses down.
“Jack, hon!” she called out.
I pulled away from the hug.
“Yeah, mom?” I asked, turning away from Lou. My mom was walking toward the edge of our yard, pulling off her gardening gloves.
“Are you gonna be much longer? Because Davina left a voice mail that I think you’re gonna to want to listen to.”
Davina? What could Davina want? I wondered.
“Okay, Mom! Coming!” I turned quickly back to Lou. “Sorry, I should—”
“Don’t worry about it.” She grinned, shoving me playfully down the path. “Go listen to your voice mail. I’ll see you at six forty-five.” She skipped up the steps to her door and waltzed into her house without looking back.
I jogged down the pavement, sticking my tongue out at the garden gnome, leaped over a crack in the sidewalk, and ran up to our front door.
“What did Davina want?” I asked eagerly.
“The message is on the house phone,” my mom said, wheeling the lawn mower up our driveway. “She’s already out of the office and on her way back to Jersey, but we can call her first thing tomorrow.” My mom looked back at me for a second. She had an expression on her face that I couldn’t read. I knew when my agent called it was usually to deliver great news or something really bad. I dashed up the steps and pushed through the front door into the quiet of our house. I snatched up the house phone from the table by the stairs and froze, suddenly realizing I had no idea how to operate it. The idea of a landline was still new to me. No one in New York ever bothered with them. As I searched the receiver for an envelope icon, my mom popped her head in the doorway.
“Press pound and then dial your father’s birthday.”
Aha! I stamped out the digits and pressed speaker phone, catching my breath as the familiar husk of my agent’s voice filled the room.
“Jack, honey. Listen.”
–LOUISA–
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I had no clue who Davina was, but she must have been important enough for Jack’s mom to walk down the street to tell him about her voice mail. Once I got to my room, I texted Jack: “Davina?! Can’t wait to hear what that’s about!”
Then I called Jenny. She answered on the first ring.
“I’m so sorry, Lou,” she said meaningfully, “I should have chosen a more private place to be mad at you. I didn’t think about how close Tanner’s desk is to ours.”
“It’s okay,” I replied, “Jack wasn’t going to be able to keep his secret forever, and even though Tanner was a jerk about it at first—”
“It kind of ended up being awesome,” Jenny interrupted. “I mean, you were no joke, standing up to him the way you did.”
“Yeah, you, too,” I said. “We were kind of brave.”
“‘Kind of’? C’mon, we totally rocked! We just gave the biggest bully a royal smackdown in front of the whole class.”
I couldn’t help but smile at the memory of Tanner’s confused and slack-jawed reaction when I told him about Jack’s Broadway salary.
“I just wanted to say that I’m sorry, too,” I said, remembering that offering Jenny an apology was the reason I’d called her. “I know we haven’t hung out in a while. But I don’t have rehearsal tomorrow, so—you wanna come over?”
Jenny never let herself get too excited about anything, which was how I knew she’d missed me because she squealed “Sure!” into the phone.
“Cool,” I said. “I’ll check with my parents, but I’m sure you can come over whenever you want.”
We said good-bye, and I instantly felt an overwhelming sense of calm. While it was certainly comforting to know that Jenny was no longer mad at me, the thing I was most relieved about was that Jack didn’t have to hide anymore. The two versions of Jack Goodrich could finally blend into one. We’d be able to talk about rehearsals at school now, and invite our classmates to see the show, and we wouldn’t have to worry about how they’d react. Plus he’d called me a “cool girl,” which, I have to admit, made me feel pretty great. I decided that some celebratory music was in order, and within minutes I was dancing like a fool, the cast album of Kinky Boots blasting from my speakers: “Say yea-ea-ea-ea-eah! Ye-ea-ea-ea-eah!” Yeah, indeed.
Jack & Louisa: Act 1 Page 9
