Enthusiasm (22 page)

I
just made the bus. “Jules, I have a surprise for you,” said Ashleigh as we got on.

“What is it?”

“Has it occurred to you that once the play’s over, it’s no more Forefield for us?”

“Well, yes, it has,” I said. It had indeed occurred to me, and today it was almost too painful to bear.

“So Ned and I have been thinking what to do about it, and we came up with a solution. Here!” She produced a piece of paper from her loose-leaf binder and handed it to me proudly.

“What’s this?” I said.

“Look at it!”

I did. It was a sheet of music, a song apparently—and the lyrics were my poem from
Sailing
.

“Wow, Ashleigh—did you write this?”

“Yes. Well, mostly. Ned helped.”

“Wow! That’s amazing.” I tried to hum it. I’m not so great at sight-reading; Ashleigh sang it to me. I had to admit, it was a good tune. “That’s beautiful,” I said. “I’m really impressed. But Ash, how does it solve the problem?”

“Ned wants me to collaborate with him on a song cycle. This is the first song. And Ms. Wilson agreed! I get to go to Forefield every week to work on it. And you can write the lyrics, so you can come too.”

“A song cycle! What’s a song cycle?”

“Oh, you know—a bunch of songs. If it weren’t Forefield, we could just start a band, but this way it’s all fancy and official and everything. They’re calling it community outreach. It’s supposed to improve Forefield’s relations with the town if they include Byz High students in some of their programs. Anyway, the point is, we get to work with Ned on writing songs, and we get to go on seeing the guys. Isn’t that crisp?”

I heard very little of what my teachers said that day. I lived in reverie. Mr. Klamp said, “Julie, snap out of it” twice, then gave up on me. Ms. Nettleton asked me to read aloud, and I did, but I have no idea what scene I read, even though it was from
Pride and Prejudice
; I didn’t hear a word I was saying. Instead, I relived the night before. How much of it I had slept through! How much I had wasted! What did it mean?

On the way to Forefield, my heart beat harder than it had since the first day of rehearsals. My eyes found Parr as soon as I arrived. He stood in the back but faced the doors, as if he were waiting for me. He looked right at me and smiled. I met his eyes as long as I could, then looked down, blushing. The intensity was too much for me.

The theater was buzzing, as if in sympathy with my heart. A group of actors greeted us excitedly. “Have you guys heard?” said Emma. “Do you know about the disaster?”

“What disaster?” said Ashleigh.

“The sets. Mr. Hatchek got fired. The sets aren’t even half done, and nobody can find his plans,” said Ravi.

“Why’d he get fired?” I asked.

Chris was lounging a little apart, as if he considered himself above the conversation, but I noticed he still managed to hear what we were saying. “An unspeakable scandal,” he said nonchalantly, with, however, a trace of satisfaction.

“What are you talking about? What does
that
mean?”

“Nobody knows,” he answered. “Except the administration, presumably. Everybody’s speculating. The second formers think he embezzled the art supply fund, and that’s why you can’t ever find any charcoal.”

“Whatever it is, there’s no art for the fourth form until they find a new teacher,” said Ravi.

“But what about the sets? Opening night’s practically next week,” cried Ashleigh.

“We’ll have to go minimalist,” said Ravi. “Empty stage, no curtain, create the sets with sheer acting and the imagination of the audience.”

“Or the new teacher could wrestle them into shape, if the school can find one,” said Parr, who was somehow standing at my elbow. How had he gotten there? My heart pounded at the sound of his voice. I leaned closer to him; I couldn’t help it. So much for easy restraint. Our arms touched.

“Give it a rest, guys, okay?” said Dean Hanson, breaking into our circle. “There’s no unspeakable scandal. But we
are
looking for a new art teacher.”

“So will we have new sets, or will we finish the old ones?” asked Emma.

“That’s for the new teacher to decide, assuming we complete our search this week. Don’t count on it, though. It’s not easy to find someone qualified this late in the year.”

“Jules—what about your mother?” said Ashleigh suddenly.

“Who—Mom?” I asked, like an idiot.

“Why not? She has an art degree, doesn’t she?”

“That’s true. She has an MFA. She did a lot of teaching before she married my father.”

“Is that so, Julie? Well, tell her to send me her resume. As soon as possible,” said the dean. “Now, shouldn’t we all get practicing?”

That Saturday I went with Seth to a reading at the bookstore in town. I had agreed to go under the impression that other people from our magazine would be there, but the only one I saw was Ms. Nettleton. The author, a small, nervous person with a huge head and tiny hands, read a chapter from a novel in which the narrator’s mother, dying of cancer, recalls in detail her passionate love affair with a wounded soldier in the French Resistance during World War II. Seth listened with rapt interest, leaning slightly toward me in his folding chair. Did he think the reading would put me in the mood?

As the story rambled from the narrator’s mother’s bedroom into a description of the French countryside, my mind began to wander to recent events in my own bedroom, and then to the stage at Forefield. I realized with a start that I’d left my copy of my
Insomnia
script, with all my notes in it, on top of the piano where Ned had been using it to rehearse. I had promised to go over Ned’s newest changes with Ashleigh—and unless Ned had remembered them and written them down on his script after rehearsal, I had the only copy.

Could I get Seth to drive me to Forefield and pick it up? But what if we ran into someone I knew? No, I would just have to apologize to Ashleigh and wait until next week.

After the reading, I made Seth drop me off at the Lius’ instead of at my father’s, so Dad and Amy wouldn’t have a chance to invite him to dinner again.

“Hot date?” asked Samantha as he drove away.

I made a face. “No, thank God. A book reading, and Ms. Nettleton was there.”

“You could let him know you don’t like him, you know.”

“I know. But he’s a decent guy, and I don’t want to hurt his feelings.”

Sam rolled her eyes. “Well, you’re going to be mad when you see who you just missed.”

“What do you mean?”

“You had a visitor. Ask your father.”

Dad looked up when I came in. “Was that Seth’s car? Why didn’t you invite him in?”

“He had to get back.”

“Too bad, he could have stayed to dinner. Oh, before I forget, a friend of yours came by looking for you. Grant, or something like that? I told him you were out with your boyfriend, so he gave me this for you. He said you left it at school.” Dad handed me my script.

My first impulse was to e-mail Parr and deny everything. But what would I say? “Dad’s wrong, Seth isn’t my boyfriend, it’s
you
I like, but so does Ashleigh and therefore my lips are forever sealed”? I had to content myself with kicking the fluffy pillows Amy had made for my new bed and tearing the flier from the reading into a thousand pieces.

My mother quit her job at the Nick-Nack Barn and started at Forefield two days later. She went whistling around the house, mostly songs from the play. I was glad to see her happy again.

Because there was so little time left before
Insomnia
opened, she scrapped Mr. Hatchek’s elaborate designs and replaced them with simple colored backdrops—slate gray and white for the lab, institutional yellow for the classroom, leaf green for the magical forest. She worked with the fourth-form painting squad as well as Mark, the lighting designer, and his team of techies to create an atmosphere of enchantment using colored scrims—screens that could look opaque or transparent, depending on how the light hit them. I may be biased, but I thought her designs were much more effective than Mr. Hatchek’s fussy backdrops.

And I wasn’t the only one who approved. Everyone in the production liked Mom, especially little Alcott Fish, who developed a crush on her that made him turn pink and squeak whenever she was nearby. Ashleigh and I laughed about it privately, but we were careful never to let him see that we’d noticed.

There was one disadvantage to having Mom around, though: no more hanging out with the guys while we waited to be picked up. Mom drove us home as soon as rehearsal ended. I hardly ever got a chance to talk to Parr, and never in private. Not that he seemed eager to talk to me now.

In a whirl of impersonal activity, I watched what I feared might be my last precious hours in his company drain away.

That Tuesday, my stepmother arrived a little earlier than usual to pick me up. She and my mother exchanged words of chilly politeness.

“What was Helen doing there?” asked Amy as we drove away. “Didn’t she remember it was Tuesday?”

I explained that Mom had a job at Forefield.

“How nice. I was wondering when she was going to get around to getting a real job. I hope she’s planning to tell your father soon. I think their settlement requires her to inform him within sixty days of any change in income,” said Amy.

“Of course she is. This is only her third day working there. Has she ever tried to cheat you out of anything that’s yours?”

“Hmp,” said the Irresistible.

We drove the rest of the way in silence.

After dinner, my father cleared his throat. “Julie, now that you have a boyfriend, there’s something Amy and I have to talk to you about,” he said. “I know Seth is a trustworthy, reliable young man, and I hope that we’ve taught you some responsibility over the years. And of course, you’re still very young; if we’ve done our jobs right, it will be a long time before you need to use this knowledge. However, I feel that it’s my duty as a physician and a parent—that is,
our
duty as
parents
—” (here he gave Amy a saccharine smile, which she returned) “—to make sure you understand—,” etc., etc., etc.

It was—can you believe it?—the Birth Control Talk.

The fourth one, chronologically speaking: Mom had given me the Talk a few years before, when I first got my period; and it had been repeated two consecutive years in Health and Hygiene, the second time with props, including a banana. Mom kept a you’d-better-not-need-these-but-just-in-case-you-do box of condoms in what I thought of as the Embarrassing Corner of the bathroom, updating them when they passed their expiration dates. (I checked.)

Hearing Seth’s name coupled with the subject of the Talk made it doubly disgusting. I begged the floor to open and swallow me, as I had done so often during this distressful year. However, it had never yet obeyed. Why should it start now?