The Fall Musical (3 page)

Lynnette leaned over to sign the sheet. Behind her was a long line, freshmen to seniors, forty-three by Harrison's count, all waiting to try out for ten roles. Everyone was dressed-up, made-up, buffed-up, hair-styled, nails-colored for the occasion.

Harrison glanced over their heads, looking for Brianna. By now, Brianna should be here. This was not like her. Brianna was usually the first one. She was supposed to have brought the instruction sheets, along with a student helper for sign-up. As the Drama Club vice president, and assistant director of the show, she
should
have been there.

As the club president, Harrison was pissed.

“That's whack, yo,” muttered a heavyset guy with a swooping emo haircut. “What if you
do
want to hear two songs? How can we sing a ballad and an up-tempo in three minutes?”

“We'll cut you off,” Harrison said. “And you
don't
have to start at the beginning of the song. Just pick the best eight to sixteen bars, show them to Ms. Gunderson, and go from there.”

“Bars?” asked Rose Wentworth, a sophomore, peeking over his shoulder.

“Ms. Gunderson goes to bars?” someone else asked. There's always a comedian.

“Bars,” Harrison repeated. “Measures. The music between the vertical lines on the page of sheet music.”

“We're supposed to have sheet music?”

It was relentless. And it happened every time. You'd think that at a school like Ridgeport, where half these kids could probably be comfortable on a professional stage, they would
know
this stuff. Instead of needing to whine, whine, whine:

“No one ever told us that!”

“Can't we just, like, sing?”

“Can we rap?”

“There's no rap in
Godspell
, dork! Wait. Is there?”

“Do we have to listen to each other's auditions?”

“I have to be out of here by four-fifteen for a cello lesson!”

One . . . two . . . three . . .
Harrison counted to calm himself down. “No rapping. You won't listen to each other—you wait in the hall. And no problem, you can sing a cappella.” Noticing a few blank responses, he added, “That means without sheet music, without accompaniment. All by yourself.”

He felt a firm pinch on his butt, and then Reese draped her arms around him from behind. “Did anyone ever tell you you're hot when you're angry?” she whispered.

“I'm. Not. Angry.” Which was true. He was not angry at that moment. He was other things, like frustrated. And . . . something else. Something that always came over him when Reese pulled stuff like this in public. Because Reese, in fact,
was
hot, especially when she put her hands on his chest from behind and breathed in his ear, forcing Harrison out of fear of embarrassment to discreetly place the sign-up clipboard in front of his pants.

“Could have fooled me,” she whispered, her breath sweet-scented and warm. He cringed as she ran her fingers through his hair, which was way too thick and never returned to its shape if you messed it up and probably now looked like a brown haystack. “You know, these are normal questions, Harrison. Not everyone is a genius like you. Now calm those fiery black eyes and be cool. You never know where it may lead.”

She gave his butt a quick pat (to a chorus of dorky “Oooooh”s from the crowd), then slunk up the aisle to an empty spot in the carpeted row between the orchestra and mezzanine seats. There, as if nothing had just happened, she began to stretch.

“They're not black, they're
brown
,” Harrison muttered, matting his hair back into shape and trying not to look like an idiot. He did not let himself look at her. Looking at Reese meant trying to figure out what she
wanted
, and that was too confusing. They had hooked up once during sophomore year. Tame tongues-and-braces stuff at a party. Didn't talk about it the rest of the year. But Reese had lost the braces and gained oh-so-much-more, and she seemed to want to make up for lost time.

For show, for real—with Reese these days, who knew? And who had time to think about it when the auditorium was in chaos—dancing and singing in the aisles, push-ups and jumping jacks, loud conversations. Darci, her face twisted into either ecstasy or pain, was yodeling (or something) into a distant corner, right next to Ethan Smith and Corbin Smythe from the a cappella group, who were singing a duet, while Lori the opera singer kept repeating “Bbbbbrrrrrrreeeeee!” in a high-pitched voice, sounding like a sparrow on speed.

Taming the masses was Brianna's job. She was good at it.

Beep.
A voice message on his cell phone. Harrison quickly glanced at the screen, which showed the familiar cell number of his dad. Gus Michaels, otherwise known as Kostas Michalakis—patriarch of the Michaels family; renowned proprietor of Kostas Korner: A Gathering Place for Fine Dining at Cheap Prices—who probably wanted Harrison to come and work after school, which meant he'd conveniently forgotten about these auditions despite the fact that Harrison had reminded him at least twenty times. Which made Harrison wonder yet again when his dad was going to realize that there was actually life beyond the diner.

But later for that. He flipped the phone shut.

“Where is the diva?” asked Charles Scopetta, the Drama Club's production designer. Charles had emerged from backstage, cradling a huge papier-mâché sun that covered all but his red Converse sneakers and his eyes, which were peeking out from under an obedient swoop of brown hair that somehow never managed to fall into his eyes. “I need her opinion.”

“It looks great,” Harrison said.

Charles put the sun down in the aisle and straightened up, ever-so-subtly sucking in his gut to hide what he fondly called the “Final Five,” as in pounds-to-lose. “Thank you, but La Glaser has final approval. Not that I don't trust your exquisite taste.”

“She's not here yet,” Harrison said.

“Oh, I knew it! I
knew
it. Freaking out in the bathroom because she cannot be the star.”

“She's the student director. She'll have power.”

“Yes, well, she does enjoy that—”

With a sudden
thump
from above, the entire auditorium fell into pitch-blackness. Every conversation, every song, stopped.

“Oops,” came a voice from the projection booth. “There seems to be a console problem. Uh, pay no attention to the man in the booth . . . heh-heh . . . ”

“
Dashiell, damn it, would you please turn on the house lights!
” Harrison yelled.

“Temper, temper,” Charles said.

“Harrison?” Dashiell shouted as the lights went back on. “Can I show you the source of the problem? It appears that we have kind of an interesting dilemma . . . ”

“Whatever!” Harrison called back. “Come down, please, we need to start!”

“It's rather massive,” Dashiell said. “But I'll locate the plug. Wait . . . ”

“What planet is he on?” Charles murmured.

“At least he's here,” Harrison said. “Where's Brianna? She was supposed get someone to do sign-up—
I shouldn't be doing this
.”

“I know,” Charles replied, “you're supposed to be running the launch meeting.”

Launch meetings were a Ridgeport tradition- brief, intense, closed-door—where the Drama Club officers recited a Pledge of Conduct before the first audition of every show. It was all about treating auditioners with positive feedback and courtesy. Corny, but it helped. Harrison knew how wound up and emotional these kids felt. He'd been there. In Ridgeport, you started training early—for voice, tap, jazz, ballet, step dancing—and each teacher had a waiting list. (So did the town's shrinks, who did a big business after each round of rejections.) A role meant you were somebody. Your picture, clipped from the newspaper, appeared in the window of every storefront. A total nobody could suddenly move onto the A-list.

“Can one of your people help with the sign-up?” Harrison asked. “I'll get Dashiell and Reese—”

“I'll get Mr. Levin away from Ms. Gunderson,” Charles said. “He can help. That's why they pay him the big bucks.”

Clutching his papier-mâché sun, Charles jogged down the aisle toward the stage. There, looking as if he were pinned between the Steinway grand piano and the stage, was the faculty adviser, Mr. Greg Levin. The sides of his beard were lifted by a pained smile. Leaning across the piano toward him, her left leg lifted up behind her so her penny loafer dangled from her bare foot, was the French teacher, Ms. Gunderson. She was pert, blond, and had a kind of preppy agelessness. She was also the accompanist for every musical audition—at least every audition since Mr. Levin had become faculty adviser.

“Invite me to the wedding, kids!” Charles called out. “But before that, we have a show to cast?”

“Oh—yes, sorry,” Mr. Levin said, his face turning red as he quickly strode up the aisle and put on his plummiest Shakespeare accent: “Once more into the breach!” Mr. Levin was a former actor with an awesome résumé. On Broadway he'd played a man who died a quick, tragic death, in a show that unfortunately did the same thing. He'd starred in an Off-Broadway musical about a talking SUV and had carried a spear dashingly in a Central Park production of
Richard III
with Kevin Kline. He was sharp, funny, smart, could play comedy and drama, and was the greatest living theater FAQ source Harrison ever knew. Whether or not he had a weakness for Ms. Gunderson was hard to tell.

“Are we all here?” he asked Charles.

“The Duchess Brianna will be delayed tonight,” Charles replied.

“Oh?” Mr. Levin said. “Is it the SAT prep course, the Intel scholarship meeting, yearbook committee, or Honor Society?”

“Overachievers Anonymous,” Charles said.

Mr. Levin smiled. “Ah well, I expect she will appear in the fullness of time.” Reaching the back of the auditorium, he took Harrison's clipboard and switched to his booming Voice of the Director: “FRIENDS, ROMANS, AND THESPIANS, AFTER SIGNING UP FOR YOUR SLOT, YOU WILL PROCEED INTO THE HALLWAY AND MAKE YOURSELVES AS COMFORTABLE AS THE CIRCUMSTANCES ALLOW. I WILL CALL YOUR NUMBER AND THE NUMBER OF THE PERSON AFTER YOU, WHO WILL BE ‘ON DECK,' AS IT WERE. . . . ”

Harrison stepped into the aisle, took Reese by the arm, and called to Dashiell in the booth. “Dashiell. Launch meeting. Backstage. Now.”

“Take me away, take me far, far away, out of here . . . ” Reese purred.

Harrison paused. “
West Side Story?
”

“Very good. Two points. Three gets you the door prize.”

Harrison didn't even want to ask. With Reese trailing him, he ran down the aisle, mounted the steps at stage left, and ran backstage.

He didn't get very far. The wing space at backstage left, normally a bleak, charmless place with cement floors and dust-darkened banks of pulleys, was now a landscape of taffeta poofs, lumpy woolens, old lamps and telephones, rickety tables, hollowed-out bookcases, two-dimensional cars, and fur coats. A group of quiet underclassmen was sifting through the piles, examining material, ripping a seam here and there, bringing more stuff from a room in a distant hallway.

Harrison blurted, “What the f—”

“Watch your language in front of the Charlettes,” Charles interrupted. “We're like a family back here.”

“A dysfunctional family,” Reese said.

“Darling,” Charles replied, “dysfunctional or not, the Charlettes are the power behind the stage. The costumes, the scenery, the makeup, the props. Now, due to circumstances beyond our control, there was a flood in the prop room. An act of God. Ha! That fits the play, doesn't it?
Godspell
. Coincidence? Your call.”

Vijay Rajput, the tallest and oldest Charlette at six feet three inches and eighteen, dumped a white wig on a pile of costumes. “What mishegas,” he said.

“Which means . . . ?” Reese asked.

“Craziness,” Vijay said, shaking his head.

Reese gave her best sensitive-girl smile. “I
love
learning Indian words.”

“It's Yiddish,” Vijay told her.

“Who's going to clean this up?” Harrison demanded.

“That job,” said Charles with exasperation, “belongs to the stage manager.”

“
We don't have a stage manager!
” Harrison said.

“And whose fault is
that
, Mr. President?” Charles asked.

Harrison stewed. It was a good question. The fall show had been his idea, but it was already September, and neither he nor Brianna had had the time to look for a good SM. Last year's SM, Rachel Kolodzny, had done the job for four years with style, but she was now at Yale, and no one else had been trained. And Harrison's younger cousin Stavros, who was dying to do the job, had moved to Brooklyn over the summer and was a freshman at a city high school. “We just can't leave everything a mess, Charles. We have to do some of the work ourselves.”

“You don't mean the officers?” Reese asked, sounding alarmed.

“Certainly not,” Charles assured her. “The president, VP, designer, tech guru, and choreographer—we are
creative royalty.
We do
not
clean up.”

“Charles . . . ” Harrison said warningly.

“Well, okay, maybe a tiny bit.”

“Let's begin the launch meeting,” Harrison said. “Where's Dashiell?”

Harrison stepped back, pulled aside the curtain, and looked out into the house. Students were still clustered near the sign-up desk, talking to Mr. Levin. Beyond them, way in the back, a large black-metal box with legs wobbled down the aisle.