by E. Lockhart
Mr. Paulson: You talk like it’s prison, when we have a yard and three bedrooms.
Sadye: I said, it’s fine.
Mr. Paulson: Your mother and I thought you’d be happy if you went away to this drama program; we only sent you because we thought you’d like it, and then you go making trouble.
Sadye: I’m sorry, Dad. I know I wasted your money.
Mr. Paulson: (keeps driving)
Sadye: Can I go in the backseat, Dad?
Mr. Paulson: You’re gonna climb over while I’m on the interstate?
Sadye: Yeah, I’ll just have the seat belt off for a second.
Mr. Paulson: Okay. But don’t kick me as you climb over. I’m going fifty-five, here.
(shuffle, bang, shuffle, bang)
Sadye: (whispering) Okay, I’m in the backseat. Dad just shoved a CD in the stereo and it’s Cabaret.
Mr. Paulson: This has been in the car since I drove you up. It’s actually pretty good! I’ve listened to it a few times. This “Wilkommen” song is in German and French, did you know that? He’s saying “bienvenue.” That’s “welcome” in French.
Sadye: It’s not pretty good, Dad.
Mr. Paulson: What?
Sadye: It’s insanely brilliant. Not pretty good.
Mr. Paulson: Okay, okay. I just thought I’d tell you I liked it.
Sadye: (whispering again) I keep telling myself I did the right thing. I saved Demi and me, right? I saved us. I saved him.
Because a friendship, a real friendship, should survive all the stuff that comes at it--boyfriends and competition and different opinions and secrets. Shouldn’t it?
Demi Howard is my best friend, so it’s okay to tell a lie to keep him in school; it’s good to make a sacrifice. That’s what he would do for me.
All right. Maybe he wouldn’t.
But that’s the point, too. You can’t only do things because you know you’ll get a return on it later. You have to do them out of generosity. Be bighearted because you are, not because someone will pay you back somehow.
Anyway, it was worth it. Because we were in the worst quarrel we’d ever had--the kind where maybe you’re not friends anymore afterward--and now we’re not. Now it’s good between us and I won’t lose him.
(pause, tinny sound of Minnelli singing “Maybe This Time” on the stereo)
I think that’s the end of this tape. Bye.
(shuffle, click)
BUT I DID lose Demi.
Home in Brenton, I spent August lying on the couch and complaining of the heat, wishing Theo would write me like he said he would, and wondering why he’d never responded to the postcard I’d sent.
I watched the clock go around. I slept. My dad, to give him credit, bought me a big photographic history of Broadway and tried to pull me out of my funk by renting Moulin Rouge and corralling us into “family movie night.” But I hated watching a musical with my parents; they weren’t going to wear Moulin Rouge outfits with me the next day, or replay “Lady Marmalade” six times and dance around the living room, or dissect Nicole Kidman’s shoddy dancing skills, the way Demi would have done. The way Nanette, Lyle, or Iz would have done. Or even Candie.
I mean, my dad had never even heard of Nicole Kidman before he saw the movie.
I spent the fall attending Brenton High, eating lunch by myself. I went back to classes at Miss Delilah’s, but I couldn’t bring myself to tell her and Mr. Trocadero I’d been expelled from Wildewood, so I stopped hanging around after class was over. I took a weekend job at a drugstore to fill the empty hours, and lived for the bursts of song that were Demi’s sloppily written e-mails and occasional photographs.
He didn’t come home until winter break, and when he got there, several inches taller and with his hair grown into a halo of fuzzy locks, he spent half the time on his cell to Lyle.
We did have our usual adventures. We put the Christmas tree ornaments into pornographic positions with each other, and my parents didn’t notice. We built a snowman that looked like Liza Minnelli until one of its arms fell off, and then we called it Lopsided Liza. We choreographed a dance number that went up and down my block in the snow, and convinced my father to trail after us with his video camera, documenting it for posterity.
But we weren’t together in the same way. Demi lived at Wildewood, soaked in theater and love. He had been in Romeo and Juliet (Mercutio), Sweet Charity (Daddy) and Master Harold and the Boys (Willie), just since September, and he was taking acting, theater history, and lighting design, in addition to academics and private voice instruction. He and Lyle had broken up for a week around Thanksgiving—but were back together now. He wore a watch Lyle had given him—an early Christmas present—and talked in that “we” speak, the way couples do, where there’s no reason to even ask who “we” is, because “we” is always the same two people. “We borrowed a car from this guy Fernando and drove into the city,” he’d say. Or “We found a way to get on the roof of the dance studio again. You sneak out the fourth-floor classroom window and go up the fire escape. No one ever locks it.”
He asked me about my life, but there wasn’t much to tell. It was razzle-dazzle deprived—no getting around it. “My mother decided to feature both the red and the yellow kitchen timers in the holiday catalog!” I shouted with as much excitement as I could fake. “My father’s tennis game has improved! I have a new bedspread! I got a B-minus in gym for never wearing knee-high socks!” Then I sang,
Knee-high socks are not for me, My calves and ankles want to breathe, you see! The knee-high socks are a fashion don’t, They can dock me down a grade, but I just won’t . . . Wear knee-high socks! Oh, knee-high socks! I tell you in my own defense, That I shall make a stand against Those knee-high sooooooocks!
He did laugh—he was always my best audience— but I noticed Demi didn’t talk to me much about his dreams for the future. I knew he was applying to Carnegie Mellon, NYU, and Juilliard (his first choice), because his parents discussed it when I went there for dinner. But he skirted around the subject with me, as if he were scared to ask what I wanted, now that I’d been somehow excluded from wanting what he did—because both of us knew I didn’t have it in me.
He loved me. I know he did.
And he probably always will.
But Demi doesn’t need me now, at all.
* * *
AFTER THE winter holidays, Demi left to go back to Wildewood.
Something changed in me then. Like I wasn’t waiting for him to come home anymore. He might return the next summer, or he might not. Maybe he’d be looking for a New York apartment with Lyle. In any case, he’d always be visiting.
We’d never be home together again, and nothing would ever be quite the same as it was.
I SHOULD tell you what happened to everyone after I left Wildewood. Demi and Lyle called me after the performance weekend and gave me the rundown of all the shows.
Birdie was the smash of the summer. Demi, Iz, and the other leads were personally congratulated by Morales afterward. Show Boat was old-fashioned but Nanette was great. Cats was better than anyone had thought it could be. And A Midsummer Night’s Unitard was a tangled two hours of pretension and Lycra that fully rivaled Bedsheet Oedipus in laughability. Even Lyle’s boatload of talent couldn’t save it.
The only upside was that Starveling didn’t faint.
Despite some continued difficulties with the mechanics of the giant man-eating plant in Little Shop, Candie’s crystal soprano broke everyone’s hearts. She went back home to New Jersey happy and well-assured of her cherries jubileeishness. Nanette told me the Jekyll poster came down once the dentist said the L-word, and Candie and her boyfriend went home promising to write every day.
She sent me a card in September with a picture of Jesus on it, saying they’d all missed me and now she was playing Laurie in her school production of Oklahoma!
I didn’t know what to say, writing back, so I drew a goofy sketch of her in a gingham dress and a cowgirl hat, kissing Hugh Jackman as Curly. Not tha
t I’m that good of an artist, but I labeled all the parts of the drawing so she could tell what it was supposed to be.
Candie never wrote back.
It’s funny that someone you lived with for a whole summer could disappear out of your life; someone you saw naked, someone who told you all about her inner life, even when you didn’t want to know, someone meek who turned out to be someone brave.
Funny how suddenly, there’s not too much information—there’s none.
Nanette went home and slept on her parents’ couch for a couple weeks, and did a callback audition for The Secret Garden in New York. She e-mailed me that her dad was barely talking to her—they hadn’t driven out to see Show Boat because her sister was in callbacks for a film—but when she got the role of Mary Lennox, he loosened up. With Nanette’s family, a lead role at La Jolla erases a lot of sins.
Within a week, she’d been shipped out to California with her Professional Children’s School laptop, where instead of living in theater-sponsored rental apartments like the other actors from out of town, she lived with Iz and her family in downtown San Diego. Iz found out that Nanette was coming and invited her; Nanette was grateful because she didn’t want to live alone.
Once she was there, Nanette e-mailed me that nothing Iz had said about herself at the start of Wildewood was true. She didn’t go to a specialized arts high school; just an ordinary public school. She took dance classes at the local Jewish community center and private voice once a week. She hadn’t been in Born Yesterday, Kiss Me Kate, or Damn Yankees, and she’d never drooled on herself during auditions. Her school didn’t allow anyone to even try out for the plays until they were seniors. What’s more, Wolf—Iz’s older boyfriend with the motorcycle—didn’t exist.
Iz broke down and confessed all this two days after Nanette arrived, saying she’d wanted Nanette to stay with her so badly she’d decided it was worth coming clean.
“I picked her up at school on Monday when I didn’t have rehearsal,” wrote Nanette, “and she was standing there alone, not talking to anyone. I think she’s kind of a freak at school. Like nobody knows what to make of her. When she got in the car—that’s when she told me. I guess because I saw her standing there by herself. Next week she’s coming up to watch a rehearsal at La Jolla.”
I was furious at Iz for lying to us. I couldn’t believe Nanette was so mellow about it, though I guess I understood, since she was practically being adopted by Iz’s family. I stomped around and complained to my mother.
“But didn’t you do the same thing?” she asked me.
“No.”
“It seems to me you did.”
Since when did my mother get analytical about my life? Since when was she even focusing on anything to do with anything besides kitchen gadgets? “I never lied,” I told her.
“Of course not.”
“She was operating under false pretenses. She lied to everyone for three consecutive summers.”
“That’s not what I meant, anyway,” my mother said. “I meant, you reinvented yourself—when you first tried out for Wildewood. Cut your hair. Got all those new clothes. Changed your name.”
“Oh.”
“Your friend Isadora”—my mother spelled the name out with her hand—“did the same thing you did.”
“Not exactly the same,” I argued. “In fact, not the same at all. Because she lied.”
“Fine.” My mother sighed. “I need to check my e-mail. Something’s coming in from work.” She opened her laptop on the kitchen table, moving her eyes away from me so she couldn’t read my lips or see me sign.
I went into the living room and put Wicked on the CD player, skipping ahead to “Popular,” and putting it on repeat.
AN HOUR LATER, I realized I wasn’t mad anymore. I went to the drugstore and bought a bunch of silly presents to make a care package for Iz and Nanette. Paper crowns, some glitter lip gloss, a paperback romance novel with racy bits, a package of water balloons, and a box of Oreos. I packed it all up in bubble wrap.
Hey, Wonder Women.
Did I ever tell you that home in Brenton my name used to be Sarah? Well, it was. And I hated it.
So I changed it to Sadye. But I never told anyone at Wildewood.
Anyway, since you guys were my best friends there, I wanted you to know.
Hope you are POUNCING as much as possible in your spare time. Brenton sucks the suckiness of Suckville, and I miss you both.
XO
Sadye.
AKA Sarah.
AKA Peter Quince.
AKA Tall Hot Box.
AKA Mint Chocolate Chip
P.S. Read page 159 of the enclosed book if you need instructions on the jumbo pounce.
FOR A WHILE after that, we e-mailed every couple days—but when Nanette went into tech rehearsals for Secret Garden, our correspondence petered out, and I didn’t hear from them all winter and spring.
I SENT THEO a postcard I found of Marlon Brando as Sky Masterson in the movie of Guys and Dolls—and gave him my e-mail address.
Like I said, he didn’t reply.
I don’t know what I would have done if he had, anyway. It wasn’t like we could go out long distance. But I also couldn’t believe he just disappeared out of my life. As if we’d never kissed.
Still, he was the first boy who found me a pounce-able, deliciously mint-chocolate-chip girl. To James, I was someone who was there, in the moonlight or on the dance floor. I could have been anyone. We hadn’t really talked.
But Theo got me. So I know there are people who do. Get me. Even if they’re hundreds of miles away.
THE END is in sight now. The end of Ohio, I mean. The end of this razzle-dazzle–deprived town.
This is my senior year, and after graduation I am going to get out of Brenton and out of this quiet house and out of the suffocating sameness, and I will never look back.
No one here is going to save me. I haven’t heard from Demi in months.
So I am going to save myself.
I know what I think is good, and why. Though not everyone will always agree with me.
I think of things—like singing on the roof, or “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” at the break of dawn, or people being flavors of ice cream, or staging Midsummer in a forest of roses.
I see stage pictures in my mind. And sometimes dances. Godspell Pillowcase. Sexy Fiddler.
I make up songs and people laugh. I am bossy and outspoken.
I am physically strong and even imposing.
I am kind when people need it, though maybe not always. When things are broken, I can see how they might be fixed.
I am not afraid to ask questions, and I am not afraid to make people angry.
I have these talents in me, though I may not have a voice made for singing or a disposition for acting.
I am Sadye Paulson, even if some people do call me Sarah, and there is bigness inside of me. So I will figure out what to do with it.
I have to.
I will.
Epilogue
TRANSCRIPT of a telephone conversation, June 12th, nearly a year after the summer at Wildewood:
Demi: Monsieur le petit Howard, at your service.
Sadye: Demi, it’s me.
Demi: Miss Sadye! It’s been like three months--no, four, I think.
Sadye: I know!
Demi: Sorry I didn’t call you back.
Sadye: S’okay. Forget about it.
Demi: No, really, I’m sorry. That was lame. I let life get away from me.
Sadye: Listen, I’m calling you now because--
Demi: Oh, wait, before you get into that. You won’t believe where I am right now.
Sadye: Where?
Demi: The center of the world.
Sadye: Where?
Demi: Forty-second Street. New York City. I swear to you, I am looking at the Lion King poster on the front of the theater.
Sadye: No way.
Demi: It’s true!
Sadye: No, I mean, you won’t believe
where I am right now. I am looking at the face of Nanette Watson on this like, enormous Secret Garden poster. That’s why I called you.
Demi: What? Where? What poster?
Sadye: I’m on Broadway and Forty-sixth.
Demi: You are not.
Sadye: Oh, but I am.
Demi: You’re like, four blocks away! Ahhhh! Lyle--wait, Sadye, Lyle wandered off, oh there he is--Lyle! Sadye is on the phone and she’s at--what?
Sadye: Broadway and Forty-sixth.
Demi: (to Lyle) Looking at a picture of Nanette Watson on Broadway! No, I’m not lying.
Sadye: What did he say?
Demi: He doesn’t believe me. Stay where you are. Okay, we’re walking north. Oops, wait, we have to go the other direction. No, Lyle! Okay, now we’re walking north. Don’t move! We’re going to be there in like two minutes.
Sadye: We have to get tickets. Wait. Why are you here? I had no idea you were going to be here.
Demi: We’re staying with Lyle’s brother till I can get into the dorms in September.
Sadye: For Juilliard?
Demi: No, those fools didn’t let me in. I’m going to NYU. It’ll be okay. Lyle’s going to Carnegie Mellon. Wait, why are you here?
Sadye: I got a summer internship with New York Theatre Workshop.
Assisting the assistant artistic director.
Demi: Getting coffee?
Sadye: Exactly. And it doesn’t pay, so I’m waiting tables in the evenings.
Demi: Still, that’s cool.
Sadye: I’m cat-sitting for this banking friend of my dad’s who’s at his country house for the summer.
Demi: Okay, we’re on Broadway and Forty-fifth now.
Sadye: Oh, I’m so excited. The box office is open. Should we buy tickets?
Demi: Yes. Can you go tonight? Wait--oh, what? Lyle wants to go too.
Sadye: Excellent.
Demi: Okay, oh, is that you in the red skirt? I think I see you, but I’m not sure.
Sadye: Reddish-pinkish skirt.
Demi: Okay, here I am, I’m waving.
Sadye: I’m hanging up now. Oh, there you are!
Demi: Lyle, there she is.
Sadye: You wave funny. Do you know that? You’ve got to work on your wave.
