A Heart Divided (7 page)

“Figures, he already knows you,” his friend said to me, slapping Jack on the back. “This hound dog here has cute-girl radar.”

“After I introduce this guy, ignore him,” Jack advised me. “Kate Pride, Chaz Martin. Chaz, meet Kate, who just moved here from up North.”

“Welcome, Kate Pride.” He shook my hand, then he leaned close. “Don’t let his Southern manners fool you. Keep both his hands in sight at all times.”

I laughed, and Jack waved him off. “You were just leaving, right, Chaz?”

“Wrong. I’m already gone,” Chaz called over his shoulder as he took off down the hall.

“My best friend,” Jack explained. “We go way back. So, you out here holding up the wall?”

“Actually, I was waiting for you.”

He looked happy about it. “Good.”

“Class starts in two minutes. Which gives you one minute to explain what you were doing under the library table the other day, and one minute to sign this.”

I handed him my clipboard, and he briefly scanned the petition. “You jump right in with both feet, I see.”

“I’ve been known to.”

“It’s complicated.”

“The under-the-table thing, or the sign-the-petition thing?”

“Both.”

“Why? Because you’re Jack Redford?” I challenged. “Someone filled me in on your noble lineage.”

He ran his hand through his hair. “I’m thinking of changing my name.”

“To what?
Jim
Redford? What’s complicated about having students vote on their own school team name?”

He hesitated, and my heart sank. No matter how beautiful he was, a racist was a racist.

“I guess I misjudged you,” I said. “My mistake.”

“You don’t understand.”

“You’re right. I don’t.”

“Arguing about names and emblems… it’s such a waste of time. Getting rid of that flag isn’t going to change one single person’s life.”

“Funny. I don’t think you’d feel that way if you were black.”

I swept past him into the classroom. As soon as the bell rang, Miss Bright’s bony hands went flying as she informed us we were going to do a cold reading of some scenes from her new play. She selected a cast of ten. They sat in a semicircle, facing the rest of us.

Her opus was called
Living in Sunshine.
A wheelchair-bound girl and an undersized guy are being bullied at school. Everyone turns against them until two popular kids come to their defense. There’s a fight. However, at a peer counseling group meeting, everyone realizes that the bullies lack self-esteem because they’re being abused at home. The play ends with a group monologue about how a teen’s life can get dark, but inside everyone there is still a ray of sunshine.

I’m not kidding.
Living in Sunshine
was so hideous that I didn’t pay any attention to the actors; Laurence Olivier would’ve died all over again if he’d had to deliver those lines. I shuddered to think that my attempt at
Black and White and Redford All Over
had been just as pitiful. But at least I’d had the good sense to destroy it.

When the bell rang, Jack hung back as if he wanted to talk to me. But I had nothing to say, so I headed out the
door. The play sucked, Redford High sucked, and Jack Red-ford sucked most of all.

I
had
to get out of working on
Living in Sunshine.

After school, I went to see Miss Bright. The faculty secretary told me I’d find her backstage in her office, where she’d be meeting with the stage manager. I felt fairly confident. I’d say some nice things about her piece, then present my plan. Surely she’d be impressed with my artistic initiative and let me work on my own play.

Suprisingly Redford High School had a decent little theater. It seated three hundred, with a proscenium arch, orchestra pit, and even fly and wing space. I went in the back way, passing the scene and costume shops, the dressing rooms, and a small rehearsal room. I found Miss Bright’s office and knocked. No answer. I put my ear to the door. Nothing.

Great. Now what? I looked around. A few shafts of light cut across the hallway, illuminating a small sign that pointed to the stage. Maybe that’s where she was. As I stepped around half-painted flats and klieg lights, I heard a voice from the stage. Not Miss Bright’s, however. Male.

I recognized the line, from Anton Chekhov’s
The Cherry Orchard
, and tiptoed closer to the stage, curious to see who the actor was. If you’re ahead of this part of the story— which I was not at the time—then you’ve already figured out that it was Jack Redford. He was performing to three hundred ghosts of assemblies past.

The Cherry Orchard
was written more than a century ago. I’d seen three different productions. But I’d never really understood the words—never really
felt
them—until that moment.

Now, in the movie version of my life, Jack would finish; I’d clap slowly; he’d turn, see me, and smile. Which would be followed by some variation on falling into each other’s arms. What actually happened was this: As I edged toward the stage, I tripped over a stray light fixture and went sprawling, one hand splashing down into an open can of orange paint.

Jack saw me. But he didn’t look happy about it. “What are you doing here?” he demanded.

“I wasn’t spying on you. I didn’t mean… Look, can you get me a towel?”

I took my hand out of the can and let the paint drip back in. He went to some metal shelving on the far wall and returned with turpentine, rags, and an empty tin bucket. Wordlessly, he tossed me a few rags, then started to wipe up orange splatters from the floor.

“Thanks for your help,” I told him. But he still didn’t say anything. So I answered for him in my best bass voice. “You’re welcome, Kate. No problem.”

More silence. He wasn’t making it easy. “I was looking for Miss Bright,” I explained.

“She’s not here.”

“Yeah, I got that.” My hand finally clean, I rubbed at a paint blob sinking into the floorboards. “Look, Jack, what you did just now was so…” I stopped. What could I say that wouldn’t sound excruciatingly trite?

He wouldn’t look at me. “It wasn’t meant for public consumption.”

“It should have been,” I said. “It was so passionate, so alive, so…” A thought struck me. “It was like you were talking about Redford.”

Still no eye contact. He reached for a clean rag. “Maybe I was.”

“Then why won’t you sign Nikki’s petition?”

Finally he looked at me. “Could you give it a rest, please?”

“Okay. We’ll stick to Chekhov. Do you know how good you are?”

He shrugged. “That monologue could make Chaz sound great.”

“Hey, it’s no
Living in Sunshine.”

He burst out laughing. I did, too. We bonded over the awfulness of our drama teacher’s so-called writing. And suddenly, everything was okay. It seemed like the most natural thing in the world to sit together on the floor and talk. I asked how he got interested in theater. He said when he was in middle school, an aunt had dragged him to a Chekhov festival in Alabama. It had changed his life.

“I saw
Uncle Vanya
seven times in four days,” he recalled. “Can you imagine this twelve-year-old brat, tenth row center, mouthing Vanya’s lines along with him?” He winced at his own recollection.

“Hey, let’s do
Vanya
instead of
Living in Sunshine.”

“I’d love to. But most people in Redford enjoy Miss Bright’s plays.”

“I guess that makes you a rebel, huh?”

He looked sheepish. “I was kind of hoping that if I worked up some classic monologues, she’d let me out of doing the play this year.”

I laughed. “I want out, too. That’s why I was looking for her.”

He wagged a finger at me. “Busted. So… maybe we could present some scenes, then. You know. Together.”

“I’m a terrible actress,” I admitted. “I’m a playwright. Well, in training, anyway. I was hoping Miss Bright would let me write my own play.” I told him about my years of workshops at the Public Theater, then asked where he’d studied acting. He’d been in plays at three different theaters
in Nashville. But not counting Miss Bright’s classes, he hadn’t studied at all. This would be his fourth year in an Angelica Bright world premiere. Unless he could get out of it.

“So I take it you’re going to be a drama major next year, right? What’s your first-choice school?”

He didn’t answer. Instead, he got up and walked toward the footlights. I followed him to the edge of the stage, where he stared out at the empty seats. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

“What?”

“That I love all this so much. The scenery. The lights. The way a theater smells. When I stand up here and look out there, I feel like… like anything is possible. I could be anyone, do anything.”

“You could.”

His dubious look said he didn’t necessarily agree. He sat at the lip of the stage, legs dangling into the orchestra pit, and gestured for me to join him. “When I got back from that Chekhov festival in Birmingham, I told Mrs. Augustus, the librarian—smartest person I know—that I wanted to be an actor.”

“Not your parents?”

“My father’s dead. And my mother…” He left the rest unsaid. Instead, he recounted how Mrs. Augustus had handed him Tennessee Williams’s
A Streetcar Named Desire
and sent him upstairs to Patricia Farrior’s room with orders not to come down until he’d read the whole thing. “When I
finished that, I was to read my way through every play in the library. And after
that
, she said she’d get me more.”

“Nice lady.”

“The best.” He scanned the empty seats, as if looking for the boy he had been. “It was like all I’d ever seen was my backyard, and she handed me a map to the world.”

“Yeah,” I said softly. Because that was how I felt, too.

“That same day, I ducked under the desk up there and carved my initials,” he continued. “As kind of a promise to myself, I guess. To follow the map she’d given me. When we met, that’s what I was looking for.”

“Why?”

He ran a hand through his hair. “It doesn’t matter.”

“Yes,” I insisted. “It does.”

He studied my face a moment. “That afternoon, I found a college catalog smack in the center of my bed. From The Citadel. Courtesy of my mother.”

The Citadel is a public military college in South Carolina, along the lines of West Point and Annapolis. Every male Redford had been a Citadel cadet, Jack explained, since before the Civil War. Chaz’s father and grandfather had gone there, too.

I scuffed my feet against the side of the stage. “So let me take a wild guess. Their theater department is not exactly hopping.”

“Good guess.”

“Your mom expects you to go there, even though she knows you want to be an actor?”

He hesitated. “She doesn’t know. Because I never told her.” Turned out he hadn’t told anyone. Not Chaz. Not even Sara.

“So… who knows, then?” I wondered.

“Mrs. Augustus. If she still remembers.”

“Who else?”

He turned, fixing those amazing blue eyes on me. And then he said: “You.”

went to the banks of the Harpeth River, which flows south through Redford. It could have been anywhere—it didn’t matter to me, as long as I was with him. We talked about everything. Except his gorgeous girlfriend. And why he wouldn’t sign the petition.

Hours later, back at the school parking lot, neither of us wanted to leave. It was dark now, and cool. He put his sweater around me and we kept talking. We exchanged e-mail addresses. I told him I’d be online that night. He said he’d be online, too. We both knew what we both meant.

When I got home, my parents were cleaning up from dinner. Where had I been? Why hadn’t I called? I gave an evasive apology, turned down the leftovers they’d saved for me, and headed up to my room. I logged on to my computer.