Dramarama

by E. Lockhart

  Thing was, the acceptance wasn’t real. I could see it when I went over to Demi’s house. I had dinner with his parents lots of times, and while his dad would be perfectly charming—telling stories about some ball game he’d gone to or some hilarity that had happened at his office party—as soon as he had to actually interact with Demi, he became this tight, false person, with nothing to say. He stretched a smile across his mouth and forced himself to pat Demi on the shoulder, but you could tell he thought his son was a limp napkin of a boy instead of the hetero breeder he’d been hoping for, and that he was simulating affection and comfort, instead of feeling them.

  Mrs. Howard was the same. Being in that house was like being in a bad sitcom. Good-looking people told amusing jokes, the decor was nice, and the living room bigger than most people’s—but no one was relating to each other. No one seemed like a real person.

  So Demi knew that an actual flesh-and-blood boyfriend—even if he could find one in razzle-dazzle– deprived Brenton—would shatter the house of ice he lived in. His parents were only okay with him being gay so long as they never had to know anything about it.

  Me, at least I had parents who—though boring— actually meant it when they said they loved me.

  Demi had no one.

  That’s why in the car, I said Demi needed to find love. Looks, brains, money, talent: everything else, he already had.

  * * *

  YOU DON’T SPEND eight years taking your kid to jazz and tap lessons without meeting some gay people. My parents lived life on the straight and narrow path, but they had long since got used to the idea of homosexuality. The jazz teacher at Miss Delilah’s, Mr. Trocadero, was flamboyant, and they’d known him for years.

  They liked Demi fine, and though at first he did his invisible straight-boy routine around them, soon it became clear that they never got worked up over anything, and in fact, barely noticed whether he was there or not—so he might as well be himself.

  Of course, Demi hates not to be noticed unless he’s trying to be invisible on purpose, so soon it became a game with us—to see if he and I could make them laugh or jolt them out of their small, even-tempered mode of relating. But it never worked. They saw him (and me) as rowdy animals of minimal interest.

  The teenagers are jumping on the couch. Sigh. I’ll read the paper in the armchair, then.

  The teenagers are attempting to stage Godspell wearing pillowcases on their heads. Well, let them enjoy themselves while I pay some bills at the kitchen table.

  The teenagers are singing songs about meatballs at top volume during dinner. Hm. This is good tomato sauce. Honey, did you buy a new brand?

  The teenagers are choreographing halfway pornographic dance numbers to songs from Fiddler on the Roof. Has anyone seen my eyeglasses?

  Like that.

  SPRING ARRIVED. Suburban gardens bloomed, plump dads pushed lawn mowers across the grass every Saturday. People played soccer in the park. My mother retiled our kitchen and my father joined a club for people interested in the history of the Civil War.

  Demi and I watched Cabaret sixteen times. (Yes, we counted.) We spent a day talking only in sinister German accents. We bought fake noses at a theatrical and costume supply shop in Cleveland, glued them on with spirit gum, and wore them all day while we shopped in department stores. I directed My Fair Lady: The Drag Interpretation in Demi’s living room while his parents were gone, to a wildly enthusiastic audience of no one. I played Henry Higgins, Colonel Pickering, Freddy Eynsford-Hill, and Alfred P. Doolittle, while Demi played Eliza and everyone else.

  We saved each other, if you can call it saving when it takes the form of body glitter and cast albums and singing “Hot Lunch” in the back of a public bus.

  And so, my life was no longer razzle-dazzle— deprived but utterly fabulous—as long as I was with Demi.

  WE GOT our Wildewood acceptance letters on the same day.

  I was in. He was in.

  We were—we were—what we had hoped we were.

  Good enough. Great.

  Talented.

  And—thank you, thank you, oh, Liza Minnelli and whatever other gods and goddesses watch over theater-mad, pizzazzy teenagers—we were leaving Ohio.

  On June 24th, we packed our sheet music and our dance clothes, bought large amounts of potato products and sugary drinks, lost the map and then found it again, argued about what cast albums to bring for the road, dusted ourselves with body glitter, and got in my dad’s beloved minivan to begin the endless drive to Wildewood.

  Demi: Hold on, wait, oops--(thump, crash)

  Sadye: You’re gonna break it!

  Demi: No, I didn’t. See? The hoo-ji-whammer is still turning.

  Sadye: Okay.

  Demi: Okay then. (deep breath) Two hours after our previous dispatch, we would like to announce that we can finally see it.

  Sadye: We are going up a long drive lined with trees.

  Demi: (disappointed) It looks like a boarding school.

  Sadye: It is a boarding school. An academy for the performing arts. It goes all year.

  Demi: Yeah, but didn’t you think it would look more--more theatrical?

  Sadye: No.

  Demi: It is way too preppy here. We didn’t drive six hours in traffic to come to some prepston boarding school.

  Sadye: For posterity’s sake, let it be noted that Demi is having a snit fit over architecture. Probably because all he’s eaten today is potato chips, French fries, and potato sticks.

  Demi: Untrue. I had two Cokes and one of your corn nuggy things.

  Sadye: Potato overdose always makes you cranky.

  Demi: For posterity, let it be noted that Wildewood looks like a collection of preppy brick buildings and green lawns nestled on the scenic edge of Lake Ontario and--

  Sadye: (interrupting) Ooh! There’s one of the theaters! The Kaufman Theater, did you see?

  Demi: Ooh! Okay, I’m happy now. The theater looked big. That was a honking big theater.

  Sadye: Turn the recorder off. We’re here.

  (thump, click)

  WE PULLED UP in front of the dorms and parked.

  Demi leaped out of the minivan and I followed; we did a waggly joy dance as soon as our feet hit the pavement. Then he disappeared. It hadn’t occurred to me that we wouldn’t be together until my father checked in with a counselor and lugged Demi’s suitcases over to one dormitory and mine to another. (Since Demi’s parents had departed mid-June for a two-month second-honeymoon European tour/safari, my dad was in charge of both of us.)

  Girls and boys.

  Demi and I had slept on each other’s shoulders on the bus to Cleveland. We had held hands in the movies and cried over the death of Tony in West Side Story. Once he even peed while I was in the shower at my house, pulling his hoodie down so it covered his eyes and barging through the door singing:

  I’m not looking at you,

  no no no.

  You’re not looking at me,

  no no no.

  I don’t wanna see your

  scrawny girly booty.

  I just really

  really really

  hafta pee!

  We had always talked about going to Wildewood together. Everything, everything we did was together, everything—and now, there he was, walking into a red-brick building, popping back out to give his name to another, different clipboard person, getting his info packet, and disappearing again.

  Gone.

  My dad lugged my bags into my dormitory while I looked at a map of the campus and got my own info packet from a counselor.

  “Do you want to come around with me and see the dance studios?” I asked, when my father returned. “They have five different theaters, too.”

  He looked at his watch.

  “Come on, Dad,” I pleaded. “You can take me to lunch and see what the cafeteria food’s like.”

  “I want to beat the traffic home, Sarah. Your mother wants me to look at some tile this afternoon.”

  “But she�
�s done with the floor.”

  “This is for the backsplash.”

  “You can’t even walk around a bit, stretch your legs?”

  He patted my shoulder. “I’d better be going.” He gave me a kiss and got in the minivan.

  THE DANCE studios were a cluster of rooms on the ground floor of an old stone building, with windows set high in the walls and doors open to the warm June air. There was no one around, so I went in.

  The floors were scuffed, but the mirrors glowed and the pianos were baby grands—nothing like the battered uprights that had stood in the corners of Miss Delilah’s rooms. I tapped a little, in my boots, then strolled down the hall to look at the girls’ changing room. It had a large mirror outlined in lightbulbs and it stank with the familiar smell of sweat and shoe leather. I flipped a switch to turn the bulbs on and looked at myself in the glass; the too-bright light made me look older. I stared at my short, nearly black hair, the heavy eye makeup, the knee-high boots with bare legs, the purple suede mini, the glitter nail polish.

  No one at Wildewood has ever met Sarah Paulson, I thought.

  And none of them ever would. Here, I could be Sadye through and through. I could work my big nose, my gawky-sexiness, my height, my Broadway obsessions. Everything that made me out of place in Brenton would make me special here. I would let my Bigness out. Not just to Demi.

  To the wide, wild world.

  “Sadye, Sadye, Sadye,” I whispered to the girl in the mirror. “Show me what you can do.”

  * * *

  SOMEONE WAS playing piano in one of the studios. “Big Spender.” The song from Sweet Charity. It requires horns—it’s a hooting, bawdy number sung by a posse of down-and-out girls who get paid to dance with men at a seedy club—but the piano arrangement sounded pretty good. I went down the hall and looked in.

  A boy my age sat at the baby grand. He was Asian American, medium weight, and looked to be about my height. Shaggy black hair and a long oval face. A wide nose that might have been broken once. Sharp eyes and a faded blue T-shirt. He was looking down at the piano in complete concentration. I could see his back muscles working through the thin fabric. He had almost no hair on his arms.

  I walked up to the piano and leaned over it, watching him play.

  He didn’t look up, but I could tell he knew I was there. He was sweating slightly in the heat.

  I’d never seen a guy my own age play the piano. It was like sex and musical theater fused together.

  A bead of moisture slid down his neck.

  “I think Charity is one of the great underrated musicals,” I said, when “Big Spender” ended. “But I don’t know about that Christina Applegate version. I like Shirley MacLaine better.”

  “They’re all too old.” The boy glanced up at me but played a few chords from what I think was “Rich Man’s Frug” with his right hand. “Gwen Verdon and Debbie Allen were too old, too.”

  “Did you see Christina? I only have the album.”

  “I live in Brooklyn,” he said. “I go fairly often if I don’t spend my money on pizza.”

  “How was she?”

  “Good. She was good. But I think Charity should be played by someone in her early twenties.”

  “Isn’t it more tragic if she’s old?” I asked. “If she’s been used so many times she can’t count, and she still believes in love, still keeps hoping she can reinvent her rotten life?”

  The boy considered. “Maybe. But maybe it’s even sadder if she’s been through all that and she’s only twenty-one. And then the ending doesn’t seem so self-delusional. Like maybe she can make a break.”

  “I always want to recast The Music Man,” I said. “Because Marian the librarian is supposed to be this Balzac-reading rebel intellectual in this conservative town, and they always cast her as a wholesome Midwestern blonde. I think she should be homely.”

  He considered. “Good point. But I’ve got a soft spot for those Midwestern blondes.”

  I sighed. “All guys do, I think.”

  The boy laughed. His name was Theo. He went to a private high school and played piano for all the school plays there. “I probably want to be a composer,” he said. “For the stage. But last year I tried out and ended up being Sky Masterson in Guys and Dolls instead of staying in the orchestra, so I came to Wildewood to see if I’ve got what it takes.”

  “Me too.” I said.

  “All of us.”

  I asked him about New York City, and Theo told me about streets that were housing projects on one side and two-million dollar brownstones on the other. A block of nothing but Indian restaurants. A park designed for people to get lost in. Sunglasses for sale on the sidewalks, hundreds of colors, all selling cheap. He told me his parents didn’t own a car. They ordered their groceries online and had them delivered. They took the subway. His mom was a law professor, his father a picture book artist.

  I told him—well, there was nothing to say about Brenton. So I told him about Demi. How we did Godspell Pillowcase and Sexy Fiddler in my living room, with me serving as director and choreographer, Demi as costumer and scenic designer, playing all the parts ourselves, and my deaf and old parents barely even noticing.

  Theo listened and laughed—but he only asked a question when I mentioned my mom’s disability. “You mean you speak sign language?”

  I shrugged. “Yeah.”

  “Amazing.”

  “I don’t know about that.”

  “My parents always wanted me to learn Chinese, and I can speak a little, but I slagged off in Mandarin at Packer. I can’t write it.”

  “Well, no one writes sign language.”

  “Still, you’re bilingual.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “You’re fluent, aren’t you?”

  I am.

  No one else, not even Demi, had ever put it that way. I am bilingual, I thought to myself. I am fluent in another language.

  “I like watching people sign,” Theo said, running his finger down the piano keys. “I guess it comes from playing piano. I’m interested in what people do with their hands.”

  “Play something else,” I told him as I sat down on the piano bench.

  And he did. He played songs from Cabaret, West Side Story, Grease, anything I asked for.

  All from memory. All without missing a note.

  I thought I might be in love.

  * * *

  MY DORM room was on the ground floor. It was larger than my bedroom at home, with dark wooden floors, an old radiator, two bunk beds, and windows looking across to the boys’ dorm. Four cheap wooden dressers and a private bathroom with bare-bones fixtures. A sign on the inside of the door read: NO SINGING OR MUSICAL INSTRUMENT PRACTICE IS PERMITTED IN THE DORMITORIES BETWEEN 8 P.M. AND 8 A.M. THESE HOURS ARE FOR QUIET, REST, AND STUDY.

  One of my three roommates, Isadora, was lying on a top bunk when I came in. “But call me Iz,” she told me. “Everyone does.”

  She was wearing jean shorts and a bikini top. Her leg muscles were cut and her eyes were enormous. Strong jaw, pockmarked skin, curly brown hair.

  I unzipped my duffel bag and started unpacking, stringing necklaces across the top of the mirror and hanging my sequined sweater off the end of the bunk bed for decoration, since it would probably be too hot to wear it much anyway. I had a poster from Wicked and another from the movie of Cabaret rolled in a cardboard tube. Iz lent me her tape.

  Where was I from?

  Ohio. Where was she from?

  San Diego. Iz went to a specialized arts school and studied voice and dance. Did I tap?

  Yes. Did she?

  Yes. Jazz?

  Yes. Jazz?

  Yes. Ballet?

  Not really. Ballet?

  Not really! What shows?

  What?

  What shows had I been in?

  Oh. Um. A West Side Story medley at Miss Delilah’s.

  What shows had she been in? Damn Yankees, Kiss Me Kate, and Born Yesterday, last year at school. All leads.

&
nbsp; Oh. Wow.

  What were my electives?

  Stage Combat and Restoration Comedy. What were hers?

  Musical Theater Audition Prep and Restoration Comedy!

  “I wanted M-TAP, but I didn’t get it,” I said.

  “Everyone wants it,” said Iz, stretching her feet up to touch the ceiling. “This is my third year here and I had to wait three years to get in. They’re very selective.”

  I was about to ask her more, when a white-blond puff of pink looked in, nodded, waved as if to say, “Don’t let me disturb you,” disappeared, and then backed into the room, lugging an enormous duffel.

  Iz and I fell silent while the girl, who was stout and sweating, climbed to the top of the second bunk, pulled a large Jekyll & Hyde poster out of the tube, and taped it up on the ceiling—presumably so she could look at it before she went to sleep.

  Eeww.

  I mean, it’s one thing for me to have Wicked and Cabaret on the wall by the dressers, or for Iz to have Harry Connick, Jr. in Pajama Game up on one side of our bathroom door, and Hugh Jackman in Oklahoma! on the other—because those shows are all great. Hugh and Harry are both hot. But it is quite another thing to have a bizarre split-personality half-monster guy biting a prostitute. Which is what the Jekyll & Hyde poster was. I hadn’t seen the musical, but I read the book in English, so I knew that Dr. Jekyll turns into a limping hunchback murderer whenever he drinks a magic potion, and that he is absolutely not the person you’d want staring down at you from above your bed.

  “I’m Sadye,” I said to the new girl, after she had finished taping. “And this is Isadora.”

  “Candie.” Her pink tank top made her damp, flushed face appear even pinker, and she had the slightly hysterical look of a white toy poodle.