Jack & Louisa: Act 3 Read online

  To Kaylee Grace and William Emmet, who, whether they like it or not, were both born into families of MTNs.

  GROSSET & DUNLAP

  Penguin Young Readers Group

  An Imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  Text copyright © 2017 by Andrew Keenan-Bolger and Kate Wetherhead.

  Illustrations copyright © 2017 by Ben Kirchner. All rights reserved.

  Published by Grosset & Dunlap, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC,

  345 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014. GROSSET & DUNLAP is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC. Printed in the USA.

  Cover illustrations by Ben Kirchner

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  Ebook ISBN: 9780515158601

  Version_1

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Copyright

  Chapter 1: Jack

  Chapter 2: Louisa

  Chapter 3: Jack

  Chapter 4: Louisa

  Chapter 5: Jack

  Chapter 6: Louisa

  Chapter 7: Jack

  Chapter 8: Louisa

  Chapter 9: Jack

  Chapter 10: Louisa

  Chapter 11: Jack

  Chapter 12: Louisa

  Chapter 13: Jack

  Chapter 14: Louisa

  Chapter 15: Jack

  Chapter 16: Louisa

  Chapter 17: Jack

  The Fantasticks

  Acknowledgments

  About the Authors

  Jack

  JUST BREATHE, I TOLD MYSELF as my castmates zipped around me, taking last swigs of water or popping a Ricola before making their next entrance. You’ve done this a million times before.

  Once again, I’d found myself waiting in the dark, preparing to step onstage and back into the spotlight. I mouthed the lyrics to my song, reciting them under my breath. Even though I was no stranger to the thrills of an opening night, this particular evening felt different.

  The action behind the curtain, however, was the same no matter what stage I was on. Dancers stretched out their hamstrings, getting ready for the kick line in the big production number. Dressers raced to their next “quick change,” carrying laundry baskets piled high with colorful costumes. Stagehands set out props as vocal warm-ups rang from every dressing room and stage managers shouted commands into their headsets—“Light cue 23 . . . and go!”

  I wasn’t at my middle school, a place where just a few months ago I’d played the lead in a production of Guys and Dolls. I wasn’t at the local theater in my hometown of Shaker Heights, Ohio. I wasn’t even on a Broadway stage.

  No, I was in a place that seemed to feel somehow more exotic—a fantasyland nestled in Michigan, a utopia where pianos were as common as lawn mowers and you were more likely to be sore from a dance class than a sunburn, a place where being able to hit a high C and knowing all the lyrics off the Hamilton cast album just meant you were one of the cool kids. A place my best friend, Lou (or Louisa Benning, as she was known on her camp forms), had spent hours describing in detail—from the acoustics of the practice rooms to the pine smell of the cubbies where you stored your dance shoes. I was, of course, at Camp Curtain Up.

  Lou had been dropping hints about Camp Curtain Up (or CCU, as she liked to call it) from the moment the curtain fell on Guys and Dolls this past spring.

  “I heard Sebastian and Tanner are both going to soccer camp,” she said one day at lunch. “And now that I’m an eighth-grader, I’m going to be gone for two weeks. I bet it’s going to be preeetty empty here in the summer.”

  Another day I found a pamphlet for the camp tucked beneath the windshield wiper of our family minivan. Gee, I wonder how that got there?

  Underestimating Lou Benning would have been a mistake. I’d known her tactics from last fall when she tried to convince me to audition for Into the Woods. So until my driveway was covered in comedy and tragedy masks drawn with sidewalk chalk, I knew we still had a ways to go.

  “You know, I heard on the radio that the Reptile Expo is going up at the I-X Center the same week that I leave for CCU,” she said, standing in my kitchen one day, holding one of my mom’s homemade fruit pops. “At least you’ll have something to do while I’m gone. I know how much you love a Gila monster—”

  “Lou, before you throw a parade,” I cut her off, “you should know, I talked to my mom last night.”

  “Oh yeah?” she asked meekly, a stream of pink juice dripping down her wrist. “And what did she say?”

  Of course I asked my parents if I could go to a place that Lou referred to as “the Hogwarts of Musical Theater.” The only reason I hadn’t mentioned it to them sooner was that I’d never actually been to a sleepaway camp—a fact to Midwesterners that seemed as strange as saying you’d never tried corn on the cob or gooey butter cake.

  “My mom said, ‘Sure.’”

  If I wasn’t holding a sticky juice pop, I was fairly sure my best friend would have leaped into my arms right then and there.

  It was such a relief to have Lou joining me at CCU, but the second my mom eased our minivan up to the camp’s Broadway marquee–inspired Welcome sign, we were forced to split up.

  “Jack, it says here that you’re in cabin three,” my mom said, flipping through the welcome packet. “Oh, and it looks like boys’ and girls’ cabins are on opposite sides of the camp.”

  Uh-oh, I thought. Guess our two-man show could be getting some new costars.

  Enter Teddy Waverly!

  The wheels of our car had barely crunched to a halt before I was dashing out the door to the cabin marked with a big wooden “3.” Inside were six metal bunk beds, each stacked with a mattress, many with sleeping bags already rolled across them. The only other person in the room was a dark-haired boy, busy unpacking his stuff onto a lower bunk. He was taller than me and wore a white polo shirt tucked into a pair of crisply ironed navy blue pants. Above his loafers, his pant legs were rolled up, revealing an inch of tan, sockless ankle, and his hair was shiny and sharply parted, like he might be carrying a comb in his pocket.

  “The top bunk is free,” he said, giving me a crooked smile. “I’d take it, but I had a fall at my last camp and busted my lip on the way down. I figured I shouldn’t chance it.”

  “Oh.” I gulped. “Yeah, that’s probably smart,” I said, slinging my backpack to the bunk above him. This probably wasn’t a good time to confess that as an only child, I’d never actually slept in a bunk bed before.

  “I’m Theodore Waverly,” he said, reaching out a hand. “But most people call me Teddy.”

  I was immediately struck by his firm grip. I wondered if it was maybe something he’d learned from his dad or from watching people play presidents on TV.

  “Hey, my best friend, Louisa, goes by her nickname, too,” I replied. “Were you here last year? You might know her.”

  “Nope, this is my first time.”

  “Yeah, me too,” I said. “Well, she’s in the eighth-grade unit as well, and if this place is even half as cool as she says, I think we’re gonna have a great summer.”

  “Here’s hoping.” He smiled.

  “Oh, I’m Jack, by the way. Jack Goodrich.”

  “Nice to meet you, Jack Goodrich,” he said, pronouncing the consonants in my name with precision. “Do you
need some help with your bags?”

  “No, my parents are unloading the car right now,” I said, pointing my thumb to the door. “What about you?”

  “Parents?” he asked. “No, I took the train from Chicago myself. They arranged for someone at the camp to pick me up from the station.”

  “Oh.” I hesitated. “I meant bags. You good?”

  “Right.” Teddy nodded, frowning a bit. “Yes . . . I am good. Thanks.”

  When I met up with Lou again at the first-day cookout, she was with her bunkmate, a shy girl from Detroit, Michigan.

  Enter Kaylee Cooper!

  Kaylee spent the whole hour completely silent, shrinking into a baggy gray hoodie like she was trying to disappear. It wasn’t until auditions later that day when she opened her mouth to sing and a HUGE belt voice rang out that we realized how special the person was hiding beneath that pile of gray fabric. Lou immediately became the president of her fan club and her cabin BFF, making sure Kaylee always felt included in camp activities.

  Rehearsals for the end-of-camp showcase started the next morning. We wasted no time before we started piecing together a collection of songs and dances that we would perform for the entire camp on our final evening. Between rehearsals we’d wedge in dance classes, acting workshops, even stage-combat lessons, so by the time we made it to dinner, we were practically collapsing into our tater tots. What made it even better? Everyone here seemed to be just as Broadway-obsessed as Lou and me.

  Things that would brand you a weirdo in Shaker Heights were just part of the daily routine at Camp Curtain Up. It wasn’t uncommon to stumble upon an impromptu Spring Awakening sing-along or someone practicing Roxie Hart’s monologue in an empty hallway. Kids gathered around campfires not to tell ghost stories but tales of doomed Broadway flops like Carrie: The Musical or Bring Back Birdie. If there was ever an argument, it was never over anything personal (there was just a lot to be said about which Elphaba really does the best riff in “The Wizard and I”). And when you passed two campers walking arm in arm, sharing a pair of earbuds, it didn’t necessarily mean they were crushing on each other. (Most likely they were just listening to a Pasek and Paul power ballad.)

  “Let’s play a game,” Teddy announced to the mess hall on our third day of camp, wiping his fingers on his Lou Malnati’s T-shirt. (In our seventy-two-hour friendship we’d only found one thing to disagree upon: As a New Yorker, I took pride in the fact that we not only invented musical theater but also made the best pizza. Teddy saw things differently, proclaiming the Chicago deep-dish to be the cuisine supreme . . . you know, like a maniac. Just to spite me, he’d taken to wearing a ratty T-shirt from his favorite pizza place, Lou Malnati’s, even though it was oversize and covered with bleach stains.)

  “What game?” Lou asked, looking up from her fruit salad.

  “It’s called Stephen Sondheim Sludge Bucket,” Teddy declared.

  “What?!” Kaylee giggled.

  “It’s easy,” Teddy said, holding up a soup bowl. “You pass this around and everyone has to take a bite of food off their plate and add it to the bowl. And you also have to name a musical by the greatest composer of all time—Stephen Sondheim.”

  I knew I liked this guy.

  “Once a title has been said, you can’t repeat it. And if you can’t think of one,” he continued, now with a smirk, “you have to eat whatever’s in the bowl!”

  A chorus of ewws swept across the table.

  “Aw man,” Kaylee said, shrinking into her chair, stuffing her hands into her oversize hoodie. “I barely know any Stephen Sondheim shows.”

  “Well, in that case, why don’t you start,” said Teddy, handing her the empty bowl.

  “Okay.” Kaylee sighed, slithering a spaghetti noodle off her plate and into the ceremonial dish. “Into the Woods. Everyone knows that one.”

  Lou and I shared a sentimental look as she took the bowl from Kaylee and added a strawberry.

  “Sunday in the Park with George.”

  “Sweeney Todd,” a boy from my cabin announced, plopping a dollop of sour cream into the bowl.

  “Company,” a girl said, pouring in a splash of chocolate milk.

  “West Side Story,” another camper chimed in, adding a pickle.

  “Follies”—a french fry.

  “Gypsy”—an Oreo.

  “A Little Night Music”—a hard-boiled egg yolk.

  All around the table this continued, each Sondheim show becoming more and more obscure and each food item looking more and more unsavory. The next thing I knew, I was staring down at the pile of steaming slush, my mind drawing a complete blank.

  “Uh-oh,” Teddy jeered. “Have we actually stumped the great Jack Goodrich: Nerd King of Nerd Mountain?”

  “Gimme a sec,” I breathed.

  “You got this, Jack!” Lou cheered from down the table.

  Suddenly a lightbulb went off in my head. “Saturday Night!” I cried. “Sondheim’s first musical.” I handed Teddy the bowl triumphantly. “And one of the few shows he wrote that never made it to Broadway.”

  “Oh no,” Kaylee whimpered, watching Teddy examine the garbage bowl. “The only other musical I knew was Sweeney Todd. If he gets even one more show, I’m gonna have to eat that, right?”

  Lou frowned, patting her back sympathetically.

  Teddy sighed, looking down at the bowl and then back up at Kaylee. “Well, I’m sorry to say . . .” He hesitated for a second. “That I will not be sharing this delicious meal with you, because I can’t for the life of me think of a single one.”

  And with that, he plunged his spoon into the muck and scooped out a heaping pile of sludge.

  “Ewwww!” the table erupted as he shoveled it into his mouth. “Gross!”

  “Whatever.” Teddy shrugged, chewing with his mouth open. “I always eat weird stuff to gross out my parents. It’s just one of my things.”

  Kaylee hugged Lou in relief as Teddy scraped the remaining bites from the bowl.

  It wasn’t until that evening as I lay in the bunk above him that I realized there was no way Teddy was truly stumped. At his showcase audition on the first day, he sang “Everybody Says Don’t,” a tune from the little-known Sondheim musical Anyone Can Whistle.

  I hadn’t realized how close Teddy, Kaylee, Lou, and I were getting until our counselors started calling us the Four Musketeers. It probably didn’t help that by the end of the first week we’d taught ourselves the four-part harmony to Jason Robert Brown’s “The New World,” and would bust it out on walks and during games of capture the flag. Nor did it help that on the day our dance teacher taught us Bob Fosse’s choreography to “All That Jazz,” the four of us performed it at the dance mixer while the new Beyoncé song thumped in the background. And when showcase numbers were announced and Kaylee got assigned the difficult but showstopping song “He Wanted a Girl” from the musical Giant, we all crowded in a practice room so she could get comfortable singing to the three of us.

  Run-throughs turned into dress rehearsals, and as we neared the end of the second week of camp, we found ourselves backstage, sparked with the frenzy of another opening night. Counselors and campers from other units filed into the empty auditorium, eager to see what the eighth-graders had been rehearsing for the past two weeks. Duets gave way to solos and soon there was only one more number before I was set to perform. Lou and I had been paired to sing a beautiful song called “Runaways” from an obscure off-off-Broadway musical called The Flood. Under any other circumstance I would be frantically rehearsing with her in the dressing room, singing our lyrics double-time to make sure they were locked into our memories, but tonight I felt myself pulled by an invisible thread to the stage-right wing.

  “Next on deck is Teddy Waverly, performing ‘Why?’ from tick, tick . . . BOOM!” our counselor Astrid said into her headset, alerting the backstage cast and crew.

  I stood in the dark, watching as Teddy took his place on a stool downstage center, bathed in the yellow gleam of a follow spot. The spars
e intro played as his gaze lifted upward, his eyes twinkling from the footlights. Despite being a total goofball offstage, tonight he seemed focused, almost freakishly relaxed. It felt like he was just sitting across from me at the mess hall, not in a five-hundred-seat theater, every ear listening in.

  “He’s really good, huh?” a voice said from behind me, causing me to practically jump out of my dress shoes.

  “Sorry,” Lou said, stifling a laugh, “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

  “It’s okay,” I whispered. “I just didn’t know you were there.”

  As Teddy moved into the bridge of the song, Lou squeezed in next to me to get a better view.

  “With only so much time to spend

  Don’t wanna waste the time I’m given . . .”

  “Think we’ll all be here next year?” Lou asked.

  “I dunno,” I whispered, keeping my eyes fixed on Teddy. “I hope so.”

  As he arrived at the end of his song, he flipped into a sweet, clear falsetto for the final note. For a moment there was only silence, then the audience burst into resounding applause.

  “We’re next,” Lou said, taking my hand. “You ready?”

  “I think so,” I said, giving her a squeeze.

  From behind us, Astrid spoke in a low voice, calling a light cue into her headset. The blackout bloomed slowly into brightness, revealing a picnic blanket a stagehand had set up for us during the scene change. I turned to my friend one last time before our entrance.

  “Thanks for convincing me to come here.”

  “Anytime,” she whispered, stepping onstage and into the warm, comforting glow of a spotlight.

  Louisa

  “YAY!”

  “You two are so good together!”

  Kaylee and Teddy were waiting for me and Jack in the wings as we exited the stage, eagerly reaching out for hugs. Our duet from The Flood had gone really well. I was almost starting to take our onstage chemistry for granted, since we’d had so many opportunities over the past year to perform together. We could still hear the applause from the crowded auditorium, where furiously spinning ceiling fans did little to keep the sweltering heat at bay. It didn’t matter, though—everyone was having such a good time cheering on their fellow campers that they barely noticed how hot it was.