Looks Page 15

  Bill’s gaze as he peers into Aimee’s face to say this is so raw and sincere that she has to look away.

  “I don’t know if you know this about me, but when your mom first met me I was a serious mess, I was nothing but a drunken doofus, I wasn’t worth a dog’s spit on the sidewalk, and your mom saw something worth saving in me. She believed that I could be a decent human being, and even though basically on some level she was wrong, basically on some level I’m always going to be a drunken doofus, that wasn’t her fault. I think when I was living with you guys I came closer to being a decent human being than I’m ever likely to be again.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Aimee says, mortified.

  “What I’m saying is talk to your mother, man! She’s a genius at building people up and making them feel better, that’s like her main skill in life. And there she is, right there in your house—she’s a resource, Ame, use her!”

  “I don’t want to use her, I want to use you.”

  “God no—me? You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “You’re the only one who understands me, Bill!”

  The sentence comes ribboning out of Aimee before she has time to think better of it, but once it’s out, billowing in the air between them, Aimee feels shattered by the lonely truth of it. And by the hideously embarrassing fact that she said it out loud.

  Like a sudden summer downpour, Aimee begins to cry.

  “Okay, Ame, now please don’t freak. Don’t wig out on me now, I’ve got office hours here.”

  Aimee sniffles, wipes her nose with the back of her hand. As she pulls it together they both look away, up at the bookshelves lining the walls of the tiny space, rather than looking directly at each other.

  “Listen, Ame. Besides all the obvious reasons why I’m no good for you as a confidant, the main problem is that I’ve already got between eighty and a hundred and twenty kids a semester who need me to take care of them and hold their hands and dry their tears and solve all their freaking problems. And believe me, they are way more messed up than you, my friend. Those last two in here—the Piggytail Twins, I call them—they are absolutely convinced that ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ by T. S. Eliot is a horror story about a werewolf.”

  Aimee laughs a little, through the last of her tears.

  “Crazy, right?” Bill grins at her, encouraged. “The whole time you were out in the hall I’m going, show me this alleged werewolf. What the hell makes you think this lyrical meditation on the alienation of modern man is about a freaking werewolf? No werewolf in the entire poem. They’ve both written me ten-page papers about T. S. Eliot and his world-famous werewolf. You’d never make a mistake like that, Ame, right? You’re way ahead of the game. You just need a little backup. So if you’re not going to talk to your mom, I think you should talk to the weird girl. Weird is good. Weird is promising. Some of my best friends are weirdos.” Bill pauses. “All of them, actually. Everybody I ever loved is weird as hell.”

  “But Mom’s the opposite of weird. You loved her.”

  Bill smiles a sad smile, the last one Aimee will see for a long time.

  “I did,” he says. “I do. The exception that proves the rule.”

  15

  Wednesday, double B Period: Double Brit Lit. Auditorium. Performance Project.

  Out in the audience somewhere, hidden from Meghan’s view but snickering audibly, are J-Bar and his crew. They arrived en masse five minutes after the bell, sauntered through the main auditorium doors in their ringer Ts and tablecloth togas and took their sweet time coming down the aisle, making a big show of barely giving a damn.

  “Coach said we could come,” J-Bar explained to Mr. Handsley when he reached the first row of seats, just to remind him who the important teacher was.

  “Welcome,” Mr. Handsley said tightly, and didn’t even acknowledge their lateness, just kept going over the order of the Caesar scenes, which exotic-fruit group would be performing when.

  Now, in the dusty dark of backstage, Becky Trainer is beside Meghan, breathing shallowly in her bedsheet toga, watching as Martha Scherpa and Kaitlyn Carmigan prep for their big debut on stage.

  “I’ll give the cue,” Becky whispers to Meghan. “When all of the Papayas are at places, I’ll say ‘places,’ and when it’s time for you to pull the curtain I’ll say ‘curtain.’”

  Meghan nods.

  “Did you get that?” Becky raises her eyebrows. “‘Places,’ and then ‘curtain.’ And then you pull the curtain.”

  I get it, Meghan thinks, because I am neither deaf nor brain damaged. She nods again.

  “Okay. Okay, then.” Becky looks unconvinced, but she turns to shade her eyes with her hand and squint toward the stage, where Martha and Kaitlyn seem to be having a whispered fight in the half-light about where to place the foam acting cube. Martha points right and Kaitlyn shakes her head vigorously and points left.

  “God, Papayas,” Becky hisses, “we said two feet upstage of the yellow spike tape, it’s so, extremely, simple!” She marches onstage, clutching the place at her shoulder where her bedsheet is pinned precariously together, and begins to boss Kaitlyn and Martha in a silent tantrum.

  Alone in the dark Meghan relaxes. She exhales and realizes that she had been holding her breath the whole time Becky was beside her. The rope for the curtain feels good in her hands, rough and bristly and powerful—almost alive—and she runs her palms up and down it, losing herself in the feeling a little.

  Behind her, a little adenoidal voice mutters, “Friends Romans countrymen lend me your ears I come to bury Caesar not to praise him friends Romans countrymen lend me your ears I come to bury Caesar not to praise him . . .”

  Meghan turns to look at Jonah Boyd, a badger in a bedsheet, scuttling around in a circle with his hands clasped behind his back about ten feet away. His greasy hair is slicked down like a dictator’s in a slab across his forehead, and his toga is fastened over a boldly striped turtleneck. He looks up in the middle of pacing, meets Meghan’s eye, and halts.

  “Can I help you?” he asks skeptically.

  Meghan gives her head a single shake no.

  “I’m aware that I’m not in the next scene, if that’s why you’re looking at me like that, but I prefer to wait for my turn here instead of down in the audience. I’m delivering the crucial Mark Antony speech, in which he convinces the crowd to mourn the murdered Caesar and turn against Brutus and the conspirators. It’s the most famous passage of the play. It’s a masterpiece of rhetoric. I’m extremely nervous.”

  Meghan almost smiles.

  “Kindly don’t watch me while I practice my lines.”

  Obediently Meghan turns back to her post—and comes face to face with Aimee Zorn, standing not six inches away from her.

  Meghan’s heart stutters.

  She staggers back a step.

  “Hey,” whispers Aimee. “There you are.”

  Overwhelmed, Meghan looks away. Out onstage Becky’s sign-language abuse of her scene mates has escalated into huge, acrobatic gestures of frustration.

  “I’ve been looking everywhere for you. First you stalk me like a creepy stalker and then I can’t find you anywhere.”

  Wildly Meghan casts her eyes around the space, searching for anyplace to look but at Aimee Zorn. For a moment she stares up into the murk of the flyspace, wishing she could shrink to the size of a dust mote, float up into the dark, and disappear.

  “Okay, you don’t have to talk to me,” Aimee says quietly. “Just listen. I need your help.”

  Meghan turns, slowly, and lets herself look at Aimee. It’s not an honest face. It’s not a kind face. It’s a face made of anger and secrets and lies. From the tight, guarded mouth to the clenched, square jaw to the glossy shimmer of I-dare-you-to that coats the surface of her eyes, Aimee’s face is a scary place for Meghan’s gaze to rest. But beneath the gloss, beneath the sharpness and tension, deep at Aimee’s core, Meghan can see something warm and real. It’s the same unnameable thing she sa
w in the sickroom on the first day of school. It’s the same thing she feels pulsing softly deep in her own chest.

  “What do you need?” Meghan asks.

  “Didn’t you hear me?” Becky Trainer explodes into Meghan’s periphery. “I said ‘places’ like four hundred times!”

  Aimee drops back into the darkness, leaving Meghan alone. Startled and confused, Meghan lurches toward the curtain rope, grabs it with both hands, and starts to pull.

  “Not ‘curtain,’” Becky whisper-screeches, “‘places,’ I said ‘places’! I knew you didn’t get it the first time!”

  “I get it,” Meghan says loudly and clearly, and the sound of her voice coming out of her own mouth, here, in the middle of a public place, is such a rare, freakish occurrence that it takes even her by surprise. Becky Trainer pauses for a second and regards Meghan curiously.

  “Sorry,” she says with a kind of awe. “Are you . . . ready to do the curtain now?”

  Meghan nods and hauls the rope down, hand-over-hand, with all her strength. Out onstage the thick orange drape splits apart and heaves in two directions, dragging along the dusty stage as it retreats with a clacking sound into the wings. The stage is flooded with brilliant light.

  After a moment’s frozen tableau, one foot propped on the acting cube like a statue, Martha Scherpa raises her arm in an awkward salute.

  “Another general shout!” she yells, clearly projecting from the diaphragm as Becky has instructed her to. “I do believe that these applauses are for some new honours that are heap’d on Caesar.”

  At this Becky Trainer leaves Meghan’s side and strides out onstage, still clutching her untrustworthy shoulder seam.

  “Why, man,” she bellows in a gruff baritone, “he doth bestride the narrow world like a Colossus, and we petty men walk under his huge legs. . . . The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves, that we are underlings.”

  “It’s Cara.” From behind Meghan, Aimee’s voice comes, hushed and cool.

  “I told you so.”

  Aimee comes to stand next to Meghan. “Harsh,” she says.

  “That’s harsh?” Meghan whispers. “Kind of like calling someone sick and disgusting?”

  Aimee is silent for a second.

  “Sorry,” she says.

  “Yeah.” Meghan nods to herself, as if she’s calling it up from memory now: “Sick, and disgusting. And you said you were gonna call the police on me.”

  “Well you followed me to my house!”

  “So?”

  “That’s a really weird thing to do!”

  “I wanted to tell you something, but you didn’t want to listen.”

  Again, Aimee’s quiet.

  “Sorry,” she says again.

  Out onstage Kaitlyn Carmigan, Madison Beam, and McKenzie Kirby-Kozak come tromping on in regal formation, drawing Meghan’s attention.

  “Caesar!” shouts Madison. Meghan notices that Madison’s toga has tiny little pastel sailboats all over it. Becky must have flipped when she showed up in that thing.

  “So what did she do?” Meghan whispers after a second.

  “I . . . it’s too complicated to explain right now.”

  “Okay.” Meghan pauses. “Basic nature of the crime?”

  “Theft,” Aimee replies in Meghan’s ear. “Betrayal.”

  Meghan nods. She won’t say I told you so twice.

  Out onstage Becky drops with a thunk to her knees. The other Papayas scurry to surround her in a hyper-dramatic modern dance pose, fingers undulating in a frame around her head, as Becky hollers out into the void of the auditorium, “And after this let Caesar seat him sure, for we will shake him, or worse days endure.”

  Becky drops her head tragically and all five girls freeze with their hands spread around her.

  From the auditorium, an anticlimactic smattering of applause, like stray drips of water splattering from a leaky faucet. Meghan can picture J-Bar and his crew, each sprawled out across three or four flip-down seats in their togas and Air Jordans, slapping their hands together in sarcastic ovation.

  Onstage Becky breaks her perfect scene-closing stillness to turn her chin in Meghan’s direction and hiss through her teeth, “Curtain!”

  Hastily Meghan grabs the far loop of the rope and hauls it down, closing the curtain and plunging backstage into inky darkness again.

  The Papayas mill excitedly offstage in the opposite direction, and through the curtain Meghan hears Mr. Handsley yell, “Persimmons, up!”

  Now Meghan turns back to Aimee again. “What’d she steal?”

  Aimee looks a little sheepish, like what she’s about to say hasn’t quite been worth so much buildup. She looks down before she says, “Um. My poem.”

  “Like, out of your locker?”

  “No, it’s, um, she sort of . . . copied my poem, and submitted it to this competition, and won, and I want it back.”

  “You mean like, you want the paper back?”

  “No, I want the words back, I want the idea back. I don’t want people thinking it’s her idea.”

  Meghan nods for a second, thinking that over. “It’s not that hard to steal ideas,” she observes, “but it’s really hard to steal them back.”

  A commotion onstage—someone’s trying to beat their way through the curtain. Meghan reaches up and reels it open a foot, and the Persimmons stride through the gap in single file: Freedom, Zach Mishra, Shane, and J-Bar, shouldering the curtain aside as they pass through it and snickering to each other as they go.

  Onstage they huddle up, reviewing their game plan. Then they join hands in the center and break with a quiet grunt. J-Bar splits from the group and saunters toward Meghan. She steels herself, feels herself shrinking away from him inside her body even though she’s not moving an inch.

  J-Bar waits until he’s half a foot away from Meghan before he speaks.

  “Hey, Butter Ball,” he says, muted as a golf announcer. “You’re looking so fine today I could just lick you from your—”

  Beside her Meghan feels Aimee take a step forward, emerging from the shadows into bold, sudden visibility. For a split second J-Bar’s face registers shock and embarrassment, then he switches modes smoothly, with no hesitation—he’s all business now that he sees that he and Meghan aren’t alone.

  “Um so can you open the curtain when I give this signal?” He demonstrates a vertical cutting motion in the air. Meghan nods. “And can you close it after Freedom says ‘Then fall, Caesar’?” Meghan nods again. “Cool. Thanks,” J-Bar says tonelessly, and he turns and rejoins the other Persimmons.

  There’s a silence. Meghan can’t look at Aimee. She waits for Aimee to ask, “What was that about?” She waits for Aimee to ask, “What was he about to say to you?” She waits for Aimee to disappear.

  But Aimee says nothing, and Meghan says nothing. Nobody goes. They just stand there side by side, looking out onstage, not speaking.

  After what feels like a very long time Aimee says quietly, “Mutant.”

  And for the first time in what feels like months, Meghan smiles.

  Within seconds of their scene beginning, Meghan realizes with mounting pleasure that the jocks are doing a terrible job.

  Shane is standing stock still, his bony shoulders sticking out of either side of his toga, his arms hanging stiffly as two wooden walking sticks by his sides. Beneath his bedsheet his bare legs are a skeleton’s legs with hair. Freedom, who prowls like a panther in gym class and struts like a pimp in the halls—nothing but swagger—has an animatronic quality onstage, shuffling into place and then freezing, lock-jawed and brain dead. Even J-Bar, sultan of suave, moves haltingly out there, like a deer caught in headlights. And he’s mumbling. They’re all mumbling—no one can hear a word they’re saying.

  “Man, they suck,” Aimee says quietly at Meghan’s shoulder.

  “Speak up!” Mr. Handsley barks from the audience.

  “DothnotBrutusbootlesskneel,” mumbles J-Bar.

  “I said speak up! Try that lin
e again, young J-Bar!” Mr. Handsley’s voice is getting louder—he’s approaching the stage.

  “DothnotBrutusbootlesskneel.” J-Bar gums the words like a toothless old guy biting at a sandwich.

  “So, um, listen,” Aimee whispers, “the thing is that there’s kind of a time thing, it’s kind of urgent, I kind of need your help right now. So can we meet up sometime kind of soon to make a plan?”

  As much as Meghan wants to pay attention to Aimee, she can’t tear her eyes off the sight of J-Bar suffering in front of the entire class. Even from this far away she can see a sheen of sweat forming on his golden forehead. His mouth is twitching and his eyes are dark and full of storms. This isn’t easy for him, and he isn’t having a good time.

  “Um . . .” Meghan whispers to Aimee distractedly. “Today after school?”

  “Perfect. Where?”

  “Louder!” Mr. Handsley cries, and vaults suddenly from the orchestra pit up onto the stage, a stunningly athletic move from this man whom Meghan has only ever seen taking small, precise steps around a classroom.

  “This is the murder scene!” Mr. Handsley cries. “This is the betrayal scene, this is arguably the crux of the entire play and it is certainly a challenging moment of physical stagecraft, which is why I assigned it to you Persimmons, mindful of your well-known talent for things physical. And here you are standing around like mannequins, muttering into your chests—you’re breaking my heart! Let’s see a little action, let’s see a little animation! Let’s hear a little projection out of you! Take it from ‘That I was constant Cimber should be banish’d.’”

  Mr. Handsley steps back but doesn’t leave the stage. J-Bar takes in a sharp, strangled breath and mutters, “ThatIwasconstantCimber shouldbebanish’dand—”

  “Stop, stop, stop!” Mr. Handsley grips his head dramatically with both hands. “I’m sorry, I can’t let you go on like that. First of all, how does an emperor stand?” He gets right up in J-Bar’s face—or as close to J-Bar’s face as he can get, given that the six-foot-two basketball captain towers over him. “Does an emperor stand like this, like a robot on steroids?” Mr. Handsley turns out to face the audience and apes J-Bar’s posture, slouched over, shoulders hunched. Then he whirls around to face Freedom. “And you, Mr. Falcon—does a noble Roman conspirator stand like this?” He imitates Freedom’s strait-jacketed stance. “Come on, now, Persimmons, you’re supposed to be young Olympians. Let’s see some physical theater out of you gentlemen!”