Dramarama

by E. Lockhart

  “Never mind,” said Nanette dismissively, and filled Iz in on the shows for that year.

  THEO WAS standing near the exit when I left the cafeteria, talking with a group of Wilders (that’s what we were called). He’d changed his T-shirt, and his thick hair was still damp from the shower.

  I was nervous, and part of me wanted to walk on with my roommates and not go after him, but then I thought—no. I’m here to try and get things I want. And that piano-playing boy is one of those things.

  I should do something. Fall on my face if I have to.

  “Theo,” I called, and he turned around. “Walk me to the dorm and I’ll tell you secrets.”

  It worked. He ran over and jostled my shoulder playfully. “That’s a small price to pay, if the secrets are any good.”

  “They’re good. I promise you.”

  I wanted to touch him, so I put my hand on the back of his neck and whispered in his ear. “Show Boat. Cats. Midsummer Night’s Dream. Bye Bye Birdie. Little Shop of Horrors. Oh, and . . . Guys and Dolls.”

  “You know for sure?” he asked.

  I shook my head. “But one of my roommates has an inside line.”

  “That’s my show,” he said as we walked down the path toward the dormitories. “That’s my show and that’s my part. Sky Masterson.”

  “I know it.”

  “You tell a good secret, Sadye,” said Theo. “You got any more like that?”

  “Maybe,” I answered. “Let me see how good you are at walking me places first.”

  “Oh, I’m fantastic at walking you places. Can’t you tell? Look at me, putting one foot in front of the other as if I’ve been doing it all my life.”

  I laughed.

  “You’ll see,” Theo went on. “I’ll walk you straight to your door. I may even come in for a moment, if that’ll get me extra secrets.”

  He wanted to come in! Forget James/Kenickie. Theo the piano man was coming to my dorm room! “You’ll have to beware the Jekyll & Hyde poster,” I warned him. “It’s seriously disturbing.”

  “Oh, I’ve survived worse already today,” he said. “One of my roommates put up a giant picture of Andrew Lloyd Webber.”

  We were strolling past the boys’ dormitory when I spotted Demi sitting on the steps, eating a bag of peanut M&M’s—and glowing. “Sadye!” he yelled, jumping up and pulling me into a bear hug. “Oh, my darling, do I have stuff to tell you!”

  “What’s up? Why weren’t you at dinner?”

  “I have stuff to tell you!”

  “I heard. Demi, this is Theo. Theo, Demi. My friend from home.”

  “Hi, hi, nice to meet you,” Demi said, waving. “But I have to steal Sadye now. I’m sorry, it’s a drama, it’s like stuff is happening in my life and I need that Sadye consult!”

  “Oh. Um. Okay.” Theo shrugged.

  “Okay, bye!”

  “Sorry!” I called as Demi grabbed my arm and yanked me into the boys’ dorm, leaving Theo out on the quad.

  “S’okay!” he called back.

  “Wait!” I said to Demi as soon as we were out of earshot. “Tell me what you think. Is he cute, or what?”

  “Very cute. A little short for you.”

  “I think he might like me. We met in the dance studio.”

  “Later, all right?”

  “He was walking me to my dorm. You dragged me away! At least let me dish!”

  “But this is important!”

  “Hey, I know what shows we’re doing.”

  “Come back to my room so I can tell you. Why are you lollygagging? Oh, wait.” Demi was halfway down the hall, dragging me by the hand. “What?”

  “I know what shows we’re doing.”

  “What are they?”

  “No, tell me your stuff. Now that you dragged me away.”

  “No, tell me the shows!”

  “No, now I want to know the stuff !”

  We went into his room, which was identical to mine, except sadly undecorated. (Boys.)

  “I kissed someone.” Demi wiggled around in excitement.

  “What?”

  “I did already. The guy down the hall!”

  “You did not.”

  “I did. Blake from Boston. Blond Blake from Boston.”

  Not only had Demi never had a boyfriend, I honestly don’t think he had ever kissed anybody before—though I wasn’t sure. A guy with his ego would never admit to seventeen and never-been-kissed. But Demi had been a picked-on, beat-up underclassman in Detroit—and so invisible he never had an opportunity in Brenton. At least, not an opportunity that he could find.

  “How did it happen?” I asked.

  “Everyone went to dinner, but I felt gross so I wanted to take a shower, and when I got out, Blake poked his head in the door and said his name, and asked did I know where the cafeteria was.”

  “Were you naked?”

  “What? No! What kind of boy do you think I am?”

  “From the shower.”

  “No, I had already gotten dressed.”

  “Okay, so Blake comes in and asks you where the cafeteria is, and . . .”

  “And he comes in, and we were chatting, la la la, about whatever, how he was in Oklahoma! at school this spring, and I was sitting on my bottom bunk and he just came and sat next to me, and the next I knew, he kissed me!”

  “That’s so European.”

  “I know.”

  “A blond boy came in and made out with you for no reason.”

  “Yes!”

  “And that’s why you missed dinner?”

  “Yes!”

  “Are you going to go out with him?”

  “I have no idea!” Demi seemed unconcerned. He was so immersed in the idea that he’d had a kissing adventure.

  “Wait, I have to see him!” I jumped up and headed for the door.

  “No, you can’t!” Demi grabbed my arm, laughing. “You can’t go looking, he’ll know I sent you!”

  “No, he won’t. He’ll think I’m some random girl.”

  “Sadye, I can’t believe you! Don’t! Okay, be subtle,” he yelled as I wrenched my hand out of his and opened the door. “Oh, no! Wait!” Demi called after me down the hall. “Back up! It’s the other way!”

  I reversed direction and walked until I saw a door with the name Blake on it. I knocked and pushed my head in. A semispherical white boy with black-rimmed glasses, wearing a checked shirt and vintage pants, was reading on one of the beds. “I’m looking for Blake,” I said.

  “Isn’t everybody?” he said, his voice nasal.

  “Is everybody?”

  “He’s kind of a god,” said the boy. Then he waved a funny little wave as if to say that he, too, appreciated the sexual appeal of Blond Blake from Boston. “I’m Lyle. Who are you?”

  “Sadye.”

  “Blake is not floating in your direction, Sadye, if you know what I mean.”

  “Oh, I know. I know.” I dropped my voice to a whisper. “I just wanted to get a look at him. Like a reconnaissance mission for a friend.”

  Lyle nodded.

  “I love your pants,” I said. And I did. They were sharkskin, dusky blue with a silvery shine.

  “Thanks,” he said. And actually blushed. Like girls didn’t give him compliments often. “You’ll see Blake at the Meat Market, day after tomorrow, anyway. Everyone will,” he told me.

  “The Meat Market?”

  “Auditions. You know, we all sit and watch each other.”

  “Aha.”

  “Aha, indeed. You check out the talent, sure— but there’s not much you can do about that. Morales is going to pick who he picks, and the rest will get the leftovers, and that’s that. So what auditions are for is— romance.”

  Lyle spoke like an observer, not like a participant. He was plump and a bit hairy for someone our age, and he wore those black-rimmed glasses and vintage clothes with such an aggressive awkwardness it was geektastic.

  “How come you’re such an expert?” I asked.

 
“I go to Wildewood year-round,” he said. “And this is my second summer. I went through this whole melodrama last year.”

  I plunked myself on Blond Blake’s bed. Lyle was chatty. He told me how last year, Iz had stepped into the part of Anita when the girl playing it was caught sneaking off campus for the third time and got sent home, and before that she had only been in the chorus. How Blond Blake from Boston did push-ups in the middle of the dorm room here on the first day, as if he couldn’t skip a single twenty-four-hour period of bod-buffing. How he (Lyle) had been Smee in Peter Pan last summer, and the guy playing Captain Hook had to wear tight red latex pants, but no one had thought to explain to him the proper underclothing. How he (Lyle again) was from a small town in Vermont and his mom was a boozer, so he was glad to be sent to boarding school because “sometimes it got ugly in the evenings.” How he’d gotten into Wildewood by doing Richard III for his monologue at the age of thirteen. He’d read Royal Shakespeare Company star Antony Sher’s book about playing the part and cribbed all the details of Sher’s performance (as he imagined them) for his audition.

  I asked him about going to Wildewood full time, and he said it was more boarding schoolish: do your homework, be on a sports team, lots of people studying classical music, classes in theater history, scene study in Ibsen and Chekhov. “For the summer institute, Morales takes over,” he explained. “You know he directed the revival of Oliver! that’s on Broadway now?”

  I nodded.

  “It was amazing. A group of us took the bus in to see it. Anyway, with him in charge, Wildewood’s all about show biz.” Lyle flashed jazz hands at me. “The straight play is just a requirement the school insists on to keep the classical training rep.”

  He was a great raconteur, Lyle. Full of Lurking Bigness.

  It was like that at Wildewood—nearly everyone I met, no matter how ordinary or subordinary their physical appearance, seemed to have that light inside them. Lyle walking down the street would be practically invisible. But Lyle talking—waving his hands and doing funny voices—I couldn’t look away.

  Lyle, Theo, Isadora, Nanette—all of them were huge personalities. Personae, even. The way Demi was. Convinced of their own fabulousness and eager to show it to the world.

  And if they weren’t like that, they were like Candie. People whose inner lives flashed across their faces with startling transparency, whose hunger was so strong you could feel it when you looked at them, and it made you want to look away. There were quite a few of these raw types at Wildewood, though not nearly so many as there were the fabulositons. The raw types were the ones who got beat up in high school. Who felt like there was no one at home who understood how they felt. The ones who escaped into theater, hoping it would save them from themselves—and sometimes it did.

  When people like Candie came to the summer institute, even if they weren’t popular, even if they weren’t beautiful, even if they couldn’t dance, even if they got a lame part in an even lamer show—they felt like they’d come home. Because it was a world where they could live and breathe theater, and they wanted nothing else so badly as they wanted that.

  Now that I think of it, maybe Demi was more like them than I knew.

  I’D BEEN talking with Lyle for forty-five minutes when Demi poked his head into the room, looking for me. I had so forgotten my reconnaissance mission that I was surprised to see him.

  “Miss Sadye,” he scolded, swishing in wearing his favorite silver shirt and brown leather pants, glitter splashed across his cheekbones, “are you going to orientation in that tired old skirt? Because I know you can do better.”

  Orientation started in ten minutes in the Kaufman Theater.

  “Lyle, meet my friend Demi, from home,” I said. “Demi, meet Lyle: genuine full-time student at Wildewood, Shakespearean heavy-hitter, former sidekick to Captain James Hook, and wearer of excellent pants.”

  “Hey,” said Demi.

  “Hey,” said Lyle.

  And I could tell. From the way Lyle looked down at his hands after they were introduced. From the way he snuck another look at Demi in his most flamboyant mode, dragging me up off the floor and tsk-tsking at the low quality of my outfit. Lyle said, “Sadye, why don’t you go change, and Demi and I will come pick you up outside your dorm in five minutes?”—and anyone could tell.

  I could. Demi could.

  Lyle had a crush.

  * * *

  FOR ORIENTATION, we assembled in the Kaufman Theater. Lyle, Nanette, Demi, and I arrived early and got seats middle center. We put our feet on the chairs in front of us and watched the parade of Wilders come into the space.

  By and large, people were dramatic. Ridiculous, even. Thrift store dresses and too much makeup, ballet shoes with street clothes, hair streaked blue or pink. Eighties throwback shirts with the necks cut out; riots of color. But one thing was like Brenton: nearly everyone was white. There were maybe six African American girls and only three guys, one being Demi. Then maybe four other people of color, including Theo, who sat way down front and seemed like he didn’t see me.

  “Point out Blake,” I whispered.

  “I can’t see him.”

  “He must be here somewhere.”

  Demi swiveled. “Way in the back, there. Don’t look! Don’t look. Okay, now!”

  Blake turned out to be tall, with male good looks, like he was carved out of rock: cleft chin, corn-silk hair, muscles. Not my type at all, but I said “Ooh la la” anyway.

  Demi giggled. “I know! Stop looking, stop looking! He’s going to see us!”

  I turned back around.

  “Don’t look at him again! I am being nonchalant,” Demi whispered, surveying the room, which was now nearly full. “Oh, baby. If those other black boys can’t sing, I’m gonna be stuck with ‘Ol’ Man River.’”

  (“Ol’ Man River,” in case you don’t already know, is a famous number from Show Boat ; it’s a big, slow song for a black man with a large, deep voice, where he symbolizes the American South in a philosophical and somewhat hokey but also beautiful way.)

  “That wouldn’t be too bad,” I said, though I was thinking Demi’s voice wasn’t low enough for “Ol’ Man River.”

  “No way,” said Demi. “I don’t want to play some old symbolic guy. There is way too much sex appeal in this body to be stuck Ol’ Man Rivering just because I am the right color.”

  “Maybe they have color-blind casting.”

  “Maybe. But I doubt it. Not for ‘Ol’ Man River,’ anyway.”

  I didn’t want to get too deep into the race issue just then. Honestly, I never did. Demi and I had talked about it before, but whenever it came up—his blackness, my whiteness—we were talking about the only thing that separated us.

  Most of the time we felt the same. We were the same. We were together. Boy/girl, gay/straight—those divisions were invisible to us, because we were the geektastic drama queens of Brenton, destined for Broadway—and that was what mattered.

  But when the black/white difference came up, as it did every now and again, I could feel a break between us. Like there was something about me that he’d never understand all the way, and something about him that I wouldn’t either.

  And when I felt separate from Demi, I felt lost. So I didn’t want to go there. “Let’s talk about me,” I said with exaggerated drama. “Let’s think of some lead parts for tall skinny flat-chested girls with big noses!”

  “Funny Girl,” Demi answered off the bat. “And maybe Victor/Victoria.”

  “You’re good,” said Nanette, who had been quiet up to this point. “How about for girls under five feet tall? I’m such a shrimp, I’ll be playing children forever.”

  Oh, so irritating. And a perfect example of what everyone was always doing at Wildewood. Because when Nanette said, “I’ll be playing children forever,” though superficially she was self-deprecating, she was also reminding us of her vast professional experience playing kids, and her assurance that she had a long career in front of her. And, as if to prove m
e right, this was what she said next: “They’re reviving The Secret Garden at La Jolla Playhouse next fall, then maybe moving it to Broadway. I have an audition in a couple weeks.”

  “Where?”

  “The theater’s near San Diego but the audition’s in L.A. The director goes up to L.A. and sees actors from all over.”

  “You’re flying cross-country for an audition?”

  “My dad thinks I should go. I guess the director saw me in Night Music and wanted to call me in.”

  Demi sighed, and I knew he felt like I did: Nanette already had what we both wanted. She’d had it for years.

  “Don’t say shrimp,” I told her. “Say Kristinish. Kristin has opened up doors for shrimpy women everywhere. You could play anything.”

  There was a tap on the microphone stage left. We settled into silence. There behind a podium stood a white woman with prominent teeth, fluffy gray-blond hair, and a dress of indistinct shape. She informed us that we should settle down now, and welcomed the group to Wildewood’s Summer Institute. Her name was Reanne Schuster. “I’ll be teaching Acting and the Classical Monologue elective,” she announced. “And I’ll direct an ensemble production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare.”

  A ripple went through the crowd. Rumors had been flying about what shows we’d be performing, but this was the first formal announcement. Nanette tipped her head at me as if to say “See? My information comes from the top.”

  “And now, without further ado,” said Reanne, “I present you with the Summer Institute’s artistic director: the inimitable, the wonderful, the Tony-winning— Jacob Morales.”

  We clapped, and I was a bit surprised to see the disheveled man from the auditions—the one with the beard who had snorted at my Juliet—mount the stairs and take the microphone in his hand.

  Morales wore a wrinkled white shirt, baseball cap, khaki shorts, and sandals. I could see the shine on his forehead, and his ankles looked thick and unhappy, somehow. “Welcome,” he said in his thin, high voice. “We are all here to create. Yes? To make something out of nothing. This summer, you will be bringing words on the page into vivid life. You will turn scatterings of musical notes into songs full of expression and meaning. You will also work harder than you’ve ever worked before.”