You in Five Acts

by Una LaMarche

  “You underestimate yourself,” you said, falling into step as I headed for the door.

  “No, I accurately estimate other people’s ability to underestimate me,” I said.

  You grinned. “Fair enough.”

  • • •

  The cast lists weren’t posted yet, even though it was only five minutes before the sixth-period bell. Since drama, dance, and music were all due to appear at the same time, there was a big group already gathered when we rolled up. Some people were talking excitedly, others silently stared at their phones, or at the empty space on the wall, as if they could somehow force the lists to manifest if they concentrated hard enough.

  I spotted Theo and Dominic hanging with some dancers on the other side of the crowd, but when they waved you over you just leaned back against the wall by the yearbook office and stripped off your coat, letting it fall at your feet. Under your thin T-shirt, the muscles in your arms stood out, reminding me of one of those relief maps we used to study in elementary school; your whole body was tensed. You raised yourself up and down on your toes, bouncing like a boxer before a fight.

  “Wait, you’re nervous now?” I asked incredulously.

  “You were so good—you are so good,” you said. “If you don’t get a solo, then this whole thing is rigged.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “But I don’t need you feeling sorry for me. Besides, if I don’t get it I’ll just live vicariously through you.”

  “What if I don’t get one, either?” you asked. I gave you a hard side-eye but you just kept bouncing. “I’ve been lucky this far, but it’s bound to run out someday. Maybe today is it.” You swallowed nervously, and I reached out instinctively to hold your hand. We didn’t touch that much back then; I wasn’t tactile like that, and you always kept a little bit of distance from me, even though you were quick to wrap your arms around other girls you hardly knew, hugging them as you walked down the hallways between classes. It never felt like rejection, though, the way you gave me space. It felt more like respect.

  “You and me—” I started to say but was interrupted by some manic clapping as Ms. Hagen rounded the corner with the drama list in her hands. I looked around for Liv, but couldn’t find her. Ethan or Dave, either. They must have still been at the fountain, or slowly making their way back, too cool to rub shoulders with the overeager masses practically trampling each other just to put an end to the misery of not knowing. And while I wasn’t proud, I was so desperate to know something that I ran up alongside all the drama majors just to see who got what.

  Just like dance, the Drama Showcase was divided into half a dozen short performances (mostly scenes from longer plays) with just a few featured roles. My eyes scrolled down past Waiting for Godot, The Zoo Story, and The Women, to the bottom of the page, where “Boroughed Trouble, an original play by Ethan Entsky,” was typed in bold caps. Liv got cast as Viola, which was no great shock. What I wasn’t expecting was the name listed right above hers, next to the role of Rodolpho.

  “Dave got it after all,” I reported when I got back to the spot where you were still bouncing anxiously next to our bags.

  “You’re surprised?” you asked. “Even if he sucked, Ethan would have cast him.”

  “I just thought he might be . . . I don’t know, jealous,” I said. I leaned next to you, starting to feel hot and itchy in my down coat, resisting the urge to squirm. My heart thudded tirelessly in my chest. I knew it was just a muscle responding to a series of involuntary spasms, but it was hard sometimes to wonder why it didn’t just give up. Why I didn’t just give up. It was so exhausting to feel constantly like I was fighting for my future. If dancing was my destiny, shouldn’t it have been easy? Inevitable? It didn’t feel like destiny should require so much constant vigilance.

  “Now, why would he be jealous?” you asked with a smirk. “He got the girl, didn’t he?”

  I smiled sadly and shook my head. I was about to open my mouth to say I couldn’t see that ending well when my breath caught in my throat. Ms. Adair was coming down the hallway, the heels of her black boots clicking impatiently on the tile as she moved, her narrow hips swishing her wrap skirt back and forth like tiny, lapping waves. In her hands was a single sheet of folded paper. I felt dizzy and sick.

  “Moment of truth,” you whispered, squeezing my clammy palm just as the sixth-period bell rang.

  “Sorry I’m late,” Ms. Adair called out as she approached the group. “Believe it or not, we literally just finished.” She reached the bulletin board but then paused, running her fingers along the crease in the paper. “It was a somewhat contentious decision-making process this year,” she said. “But I hope you’ll agree that every dancer got the part they . . . deserve.” She turned and fastened the list to the board with two red pushpins. “I’ll be in my office after four,” she said, stepping aside to let the buzzards descend, “in case anyone has anything they need to discuss.” She looked right at me when she said that last part, and then swished past us, clicking back down the hall as quickly as she’d come.

  “I can’t look,” I said, my voice thick with nausea.

  “Then I will,” you said. A few yards away, Lolly leapt back from the list and started shrieking. She was happy about something. Of course she was. Of course she got it and not me. How could I ever have convinced myself otherwise?

  I watched you move through the mob, my heart still going like a runaway train. It seemed like it took you forever to travel ten feet. That taffy-pull feeling came back, a pinhole focused on you, everything else starting to go gray. My fingers fumbled for my coat zipper. I wondered if I was about to faint.

  But then I heard it: that wolf like whoop, your trademark celebration song. You ran back over to me, your face lit up like Christmas morning, and scooped my rigid body into your arms, swinging me around in a circle.

  “We did it!” you said. “You and me, baby, pas de deux.”

  “You and me,” I repeated, not quite believing. “But Lolly—”

  “Lollipop got a solo,” you said, stopping for a minute and holding me at arm’s length. “Dominic, too. But the grand pas de deux is all you and me. And get this—it’s Don Quixote. I told you! I told you we killed it!”

  Everything felt off-kilter, but all of a sudden in a good way, like stepping off a roller coaster, the rush settling into your bones as gravity pulls you back down. You hugged me again, laughing into my hair, and then I was laughing, too—crying, almost—letting it all wash over me: the relief, the giddiness, the pride and amazement.

  I was one step closer to beating the odds and realizing my dream. But there was something else happening, too. I couldn’t place it then, but I know it now.

  That was the moment I first felt it. That obvious, unstoppable truth.

  You and me.

  Act Two

  Dave

  Chapter Eight

  February 2

  100 days left

  I WAS PREPARED for New York to change me. I needed it to. I didn’t just want to live somewhere different, I wanted to be someone different. First and foremost, not a dick, which seemed to be the general consensus at Harvard Westlake before my untimely departure.

  But that was behind me. No more faking it in a city of fakes. No more dry L.A. heat, no more freeway traffic, no more awkward auditions for too-tan casting directors who raised their eyebrows at my résumé, jotting down notes next to my Saving Nathan credit, probably some variation on LOL. No more Daphne—my agent—leaving me voicemail messages that started with long, dramatic sighs, which I would immediately delete because I knew what that meant without having to listen to the words that came after. No more Mom pushing me to go out for humiliating acne commercials or community theater productions, telling me I just had to keep my name out there. I once heard her on the phone with my dad, after they split but before Dad and I left, telling him my brand was failing. My brand. I never wanted to be a brand. I did
n’t even really want to be an actor anymore. So as messed up as everything had gotten, I was kind of excited to start over. I was ready for a change.

  I just wasn’t ready for you.

  Less than a month in and I was more miserable than I’d ever been. I thought a new school would be the best part of the whole deal, some nice, boring white noise to numb me for the quick five-month slide to graduation—that had been the point of the string-pulling, just making sure I’d get left alone—but then I’d seen you, and been stupid and helpless, and before I knew it I was memorizing lines and learning blocking and spending my days the opposite of numb: pent-up and pissed off. Ready to burst.

  It didn’t help that at end of every rehearsal I went home to find Dad dozing on the fold-out couch at 5 P.M. while Nana and Pop-Pop watched Jeopardy! in the kitchen, with the volume so loud I could already hear it by the time I got off the elevator. They’d mute it just to ask how my day was, and I’d shrug and mumble something about hating it, before grabbing a snack from the fridge and storming off to the geriatric “man-cave” that had become my bedroom. I was basically playing the part of the tortured, brooding teenage son in any TV drama; too bad no one was filming or I could have added it to my reel.

  They were putting us up indefinitely until Dad found a job, but based on his tendency to fill his days going to yoga and/or drinking scotch while reading books with titles like Daily Meditations for Codependents, that seemed unlikely to happen anytime soon. And it was easier to tune them out than to try to explain everything. About Mom and how weirdly cheerful she was being. About how much it stung every time she e-mailed one of her updates full of exclamation points and smiley faces and casually dropped names of promising up-and-comers she was working on signing. About how it took my supposed friends back in L.A. days to return my texts, which had been getting increasingly pathetic. And, speaking of pathetic, about how I was developing a serious crush on my costar in the school play, who had everything I’d ever wanted in a girl, except for the one thing I didn’t, which was a boyfriend.

  Or, pseudo-boyfriend—it was really fucking hard to tell—but either way he was my director and so I was confirmedly, completely screwed. Which meant that nothing had changed, really, which might have been the worst thing of all.

  • • •

  “On a night like this, you can see the whole city,” I said. We were sitting next to each other on the edge of the stage, our legs dangling into the empty orchestra pit. You were wearing a thin, fuzzy sweater that rubbed gently against my bare forearm whenever you moved, raising my body temperature by a good three degrees. The top of your head was just about in line with my nose, which is how I knew that your hair smelled like lavender and honey. It made it hard to focus, and really, really hard not to hate Ethan.

  It had taken me exactly one read-through to realize that Boroughed Trouble (pun most definitely intended) was an extremely thinly veiled wish-fulfillment fantasy about you. Sure, it was technically about an Italian immigrant building the Queensboro Bridge in 1905, and the two characters were strangers, which threw me off initially, but the way the beautiful and enigmatic Viola fell for the lonely, underappreciated Rodolpho (who wrote plays when he wasn’t building bridges all by himself in the middle of the night) started to imitate life a little too closely. Especially after you guys started . . . doing whatever you were doing. I didn’t bother asking. I didn’t want to know.

  “Sometimes,” you sighed, “I wish I couldn’t see it at all. I long for the mountains back home.” You leaned into my shoulder, dropping your hand into my lap, where you found my fingers and curled yours around them, massaging my palm. I gulped, which wasn’t in the script. You were turning me into a method actor.

  “How can you say that?” I asked, my heart beating furiously in anticipation of what I knew was about to happen. “It’s so much better here. There’s so much opportunity.”

  “Sewing underclothing in a stifling factory until my fingers bleed doesn’t seem much like opportunity,” you said. “The conditions were better traveling steerage.”

  “That can’t be true,” I said, drawing away from you despite my body’s vehement objection. Rodolpho was not supposed to make the first move on Viola. It was crucial, Ethan argued, that she be the one to seduce him. I tried not to think about whether he’d added that part before or after the party.

  I still hadn’t recovered from the moment you’d come out of the coatroom and pounced on him. The night had gotten weird, for sure, but I’d thought we’d had a pretty promising start. You’d been so cool and unassuming at the auditions, the only person who didn’t seem to care who I was, or was supposed to be. And then, at your house, you’d somehow sensed that if left to my own devices I’d retreat into the corner to play chess on my phone for hours. “This is going to suck no matter how you do it,” you’d said, handing me a beer and giving me a reassuring smile. “So let me introduce you to everyone now and then you can come back Monday morning not feeling like the new guy.” It was like you’d instantly understood, without knowing me yet, exactly what I needed. Until you’d started making out with someone else.

  “Your line,” you whispered, without moving your lips, which I noticed because I’d been staring at them. You rubbed your thumb against my palm and I almost bolted upright.

  “Besides,” I stammered, gesturing out to the imaginary cityscape in front of us. “This is just the beginning. You speak as if this is the end.”

  “Maybe I wish it was,” you said, your voice turning hollow and pained. I looked at you, forcing my face into an expression of concern as my eyes traced your profile, taking in your thick lashes, your perfect skin, the tantalizing curve of your mouth, which was trembling as you stared out into the empty seats, preparing to deliver the monologue that led to the part of the play I’d been waiting to practice ever since I’d taken my script home the day casting was announced. I’d chewed as much gum as I could stomach before we’d started rehearsal, but that had been at least an hour ago. I ran my tongue over the roof of my mouth, checking for any traces of the ill-advised vegan burrito I’d had for lunch.

  “I just want to feel something,” you said, looking down at the “water.” “I want to feel something other than homesickness. I want to know something other than sadness. I want to see something besides my mother’s face as she lay dying. I want to touch something other than a sewing needle.” You looked up at me, raising a hand to my face and tracing a line from my temple to my Adam’s apple. I swallowed thickly, working hard to look confused and reluctant instead of crazy with pent-up lust. “I want to feel something . . .” you said again, starting to pull me in by the back of the neck. I started to close my eyes, ready to feel what I’d been waiting to feel since the first day we met, what I’d been imagining while lying in the dark on my slowly deflating air mattress every night for weeks, when—

  “Cut!” Ethan yelled from the back of the auditorium. Fucking Ethan. I’d almost forgotten he was there.

  You dropped your hands to the lip of the stage and turned away, letting out a slow, shaky exhale. I thought for a second you might be relieved, but then you glared out at Ethan with an expression of unmistakable contempt.

  “What the hell?” you said. “I was in the zone. You couldn’t just let me finish my fucking lines?”

  “It’s not your delivery, babe,” Ethan said, bounding down the aisle steps two at a time. He had taken to calling you exclusively babe or baby. “I just don’t think we need to rehearse the, um . . .” He frowned down at the script he had bound in a leather binder with a leather strap that tied around the front like something out of the nineteenth century. I was frankly pretty surprised he hadn’t written the thing out with a quill.

  “The what?” you demanded, crossing your arms defiantly. “The climax of the whole play?”

  “Climax is a strong word,” Ethan said, frowning. “If anything, the climax is when Rodolpho jumps off the bridge after Viola leave
s.” Boroughed Trouble ended with a tragic suicide twist, which lent the whole art-imitating-life aspect a pretty creepy vibe.

  “But that’s the end,” you said. “The climax can’t be at the end.”

  “That’s what she said.” Ethan grinned. It made my skin crawl to think about his hands on you.

  “Oh my God,” you groaned.

  “That’s also what she said.”

  “Please, seriously, stop.” You grimaced and covered your face with your palms. Ethan’s smile disappeared, and I had to admit, when I repressed the mental image of the two of you sucking face by the pretzel bowl, I felt kind of sorry for the guy. Any time he touched you, you wriggled away, and all you did during rehearsal was challenge him. Don’t get me wrong, I agreed with you—Ethan could be pretty pretentious, and the script sometimes read like a fanboy mash-up of his favorite scenes from classic plays. But that didn’t change the fact that he was the director, or that he was directing me playing some imaginary version of him meeting you, playing . . . well, basically just you. All while I fell for you in the process of rehearsing the play about you falling for him. It all would have been weird enough without the kiss Ethan had written into the script, but it was extremely weird with the kiss. I didn’t know how much longer I could stand it.

  “I just think,” you said, your fingers—topped with bitten-down, gold-painted nails—migrating into prayer position in front of your lips, “That the kiss is a pretty important part. I mean, she ran onto the bridge to kill herself because her mom died of consumption and she’s stuck in some old-timey sweatshop making Prohibition panties—”

  “Prohibition was actually 1920, so—” Ethan interrupted, but you shot him a look that shut him right up.

  “Regardless, she’s ending it all because everything sucks,” you said. “But then she meets this guy who manages to show her that all is not lost, and there’s love out there for her—” you glanced at me and I could swear the corners of your lips turned up ever so slightly “—and that kiss is the moment that she takes life into her own hands for the first time, and takes what she wants instead of what’s been forced on or expected of her. So the way I see it, the kiss is her making the choice to live. Which I’d say is a pretty fucking important moment. Wouldn’t you?” You raised your eyebrows expectantly, and Ethan just stared at you with the exact same dumbfounded admiration I was trying so hard to repress.