Playing Juliet Read online

  “What’s the matter?” she asked.

  “Mrs. Lester . . .” The rest came out in a rush. “She said there was a rumor the theater is going to close.”

  Zandy was so startled she raised her voice. “Close? The Oakfield Children’s Theater?”

  The Ugly Stepsisters looked up from their books simultaneously. Pam, the one in the purple wig and fake nose, turned to Tina. “How did they find out?” she asked.

  At least, I think that’s what Pam said. She’d dropped her voice really low. If there’s anything you learn by spending all your time at the theater, it’s how to control your voice.

  Tina shook her blue ringlets. “Pas devant les enfants.”

  And they both shut their books, got up, and left the dressing room.

  I looked up at the TV monitor that showed the stage and frowned. “Isn’t it too early for their entrance?”

  Zandy gave the monitor a quick glance, then turned back to the mirror. “Way too early.” Now she was frowning, too. “You know my mom’s made me take French since I was about three?” She whispered so quietly I had to watch her lips moving to understand her.

  I nodded at her mirror image. Of course I know. If there’s a class around, Zandy’s mom has signed her up for it.

  Zandy picked up a false eyelash with two-inch-long silver lashes and bobbed her head ever so slightly at where the Ugly Stepsisters had sat. “Tina said, ‘Don’t talk in front of the kids.’ My mother used to say that a lot when I was little. Before we moved to Oakfield.”

  She paused. Zandy doesn’t talk much about her life before she moved here.

  “Whenever I hear it, I always think something really horrible is going to happen,” she finally continued.

  I picked up the lid to the jar of cold cream and screwed it back on. “We could ask Tina or Pam. They definitely know something.”

  Zandy knew she’d be the one doing the asking. She opened her mouth as wide as she could and stuck the eyelash on her right eyelid. She batted her eyes to see if it was on tight. “Why not just ask Mrs. Lester?”

  “She told me not to ask her anything else. She sounded like she meant it.”

  “Pam, then,” Zandy said decisively, reaching for the second eyelash. “I’ve been in a couple of plays with her. She’s really nice.”

  Zandy’s been in a couple of plays with almost everyone. Her first audition was on the day after her seventh birthday, the first time she was old enough to try out. She got cast as the youngest daughter in The Sound of Music. With a solo. She’s been cast in almost every production she’s tried out for ever since.

  That was my first audition, too. I didn’t even get a callback.

  Zandy glued on the second silver strip and batted her eyes again. “I hate the way these feel,” she said and slipped off the headband protecting her hair.

  The Mice started to get up and head for the door. I checked the monitor and stood, too.

  “We’ll catch Pam during intermission,” I whispered and left for my next entrance.

  But Pam wouldn’t be caught. We couldn’t find her—or Tina—anywhere.

  “They can’t duck us when the play’s over,” I said. “If we don’t run into them in the lobby, we’ll catch them when they’re changing.”

  After the play, the lobby was so packed with the actors and the audience all talking and gesturing and hugging, it was almost impossible to move. I could see my dad on the far side of the room next to the light switch. That’s where my parents always wait for me. My dad’s really tall and blond, so he’s easy to spot. I plunged into the crowd only to be stopped by one of my little brother’s peskiest friends.

  “Beth, could you sign my program for me?” he asked.

  He looked at me almost shyly as he handed me a pen. “The Cat was really funny,” he said as I wrote my name. Then two kids from my class came up. And suddenly it seemed as if everybody in the lobby wanted my autograph.

  It feels really good to have perfect strangers tell you what a great job you did. It feels even better when some of them say you’re a really talented actress. It took a while to work my way across the room to my parents, but I didn’t mind.

  I was almost there when the ninth person stopped me. I waved at my parents before I signed her program. Mom waved back enthusiastically. She’s not as tall as my dad, but she stands out in a room almost as much because she’s got all this energy. She moves her arms when she talks and her face always shows exactly what she’s thinking. My little brother, R. J., has her brown hair. I got my dad’s. I could see my dad and R. J. out of the corner of my eye, leaning against the wall with their arms crossed, obviously ready to go home.

  My parents were congratulating Zandy when I finally reached them. Mom handed me a bouquet of red and white carnations and gave me a quick hug. “What a performance! But it looks like everyone’s told you that already. How many people asked you to sign their programs?”

  Zandy and I both shrugged, as though we hadn’t been counting, but I was grinning as I handed the flowers back. “Hold these while I change?”

  “I always do.”

  Dad leaned down for his hug. “Good job.” He held me at an arm’s length to look at my face. “Great whiskers! Any chance you two could change quickly? I’ve had a rough day.”

  Poor Dad. He was usually in bed by nine o’clock.

  “Ten minutes,” I promised, and we headed off to intercept the Ugly Stepsisters.

  Pam and Tina must have made one of the fastest costume changes on record. They were heading out of the dressing room just as we got there.

  Zandy put her hands on her hips as we watched the door close behind them.

  “Something really is going on.”

  “I’ve felt something was wrong for weeks,” I said. “You know that line from Shakespeare: ‘By the pricking of my thumbs . . .’” I clapped my hand over my mouth, dumbfounded by what I’d done.

  “I don’t know Shakespeare,” Zandy said, starting to unzip her Fairy Godmother costume. “You’re the literary one. I only do musicals.”

  I felt as if someone was staring at me behind my back. I turned around slowly to see Emily Chang holding Cinderella’s ball gown in one hand and a hanger in the other, looking at me in disbelief. She walked over and bent down to speak almost in my ear.

  “Do you realize you just quoted the Scottish play?” she asked urgently, but so quietly only I could hear her. “That’s the worst thing you can do in a theater.”

  Mrs. Macintosh is our director. At the beginning of every play, she tells us to come see her if anything is bothering us. The last thing she says is, “My door is always open.”

  I went to talk to her as soon as I changed. I’d never gone by myself to see Mrs. Mac before, but Zandy had to take her crown and wand down to the costume shop and I was too worried to wait. I may not have been cast in the first play I tried out for, but I was part of this theater now, and I wasn’t about to let it close. I had worked too hard to get here.

  I hurried down the hallway to Mrs. Mac’s office, but I stopped when I reached her door.

  It was closed.

  I stood and stared at it for a minute, the quote from the Scottish play running through my head as if it were printed right above the doorknob.

  Thank goodness Zandy always sleeps over on opening night. I needed to talk to her so badly. I turned around and headed back to the lobby.

  The crowd had thinned out but I couldn’t see Zandy anywhere. My dad broke the news to me: “Zandy had to go home, Scooter. Her mom came to pick her up. They asked us to tell you she can’t sleep over tonight.”

  R. J. always plays with plastic monsters in the car. I buried my face in the spicy scent of the carnations from my parents and listened to him grunt and moan next to me as he knocked his monsters together in battle. The car turned left and in the backseat, R. J. and I swayed with the motion. But not Zandy.

  There had to be a major emergency for her to go home without waiting to tell me why. Zan has super perfect manner
s. Now I had to worry about her as well as whether our theater was closing.

  I looked out the car window. The rain had finally stopped. Big houses on big lawns changed to medium houses on medium lawns. The fruit trees were in bloom, and the white flowers on the plum trees looked like tufts of popcorn whenever the car’s lights shone on them.

  I suddenly became aware of what R. J. was playing.

  “Save the Cat,” he said, and a green Tyrannosaurus rex was knocked to the seat between us by a handful of action heroes.

  “Am I the Cat?” I asked.

  His action figures answered in as gruff a voice as an eight-year-old can manage. “You are the Cat. We save you from monsters.”

  “When I was in A Christmas Carol, you guys attacked me.” I’ve spent a lot of years talking to action figures.

  “The Cratchett girl wasn’t funny. The Cat is funny.”

  Action figures talk in very short sentences.

  My parents were talking about gardening. Right now they were debating the best fertilizer for their roses. I stopped listening and started reliving my conversation with Mrs. Lester. My dad had to call my name twice before I realized he was speaking to me.

  “Beth, you won’t believe this, but some guy sitting in the row behind us said you should be doing professional work. On TV, no less.”

  “Was he a TV producer?” I asked. “Or an agent?”

  Both my parents laughed. I stroked the soft gray velvet of the upholstery with my index finger, counting the seconds while I waited for the reply.

  One. Two. Three. Four.

  Dad made another left turn before he answered.

  Five. Six. Seven.

  “I don’t know who he was. But I told him straight out, ‘My daughter just does this for fun. She wants to be a lawyer.’”

  “Just like her dad,” Mom chimed in.

  I didn’t say anything. I never do. There are some dreams you don’t put into words. And it was my own fault my parents thought I wanted to be a lawyer.

  Eight’s my lucky number. I didn’t reach it.

  I stared out the window at the medium-sized houses we were passing. Dark. Lights on. Lights on. Dark. Dark. Dark.

  What would I do if my theater went dark forever?

  CHAPTER THREE

  Now must we to her window,

  And give some evening music to her ear.

  Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona

  The answering machine was blinking as we walked in the house.

  “Hey, E-lizzy-beth,” said Zandy. “Sorry I couldn’t come over.” Her words slowed down. “I’d really, really love to see you tonight, but . . .”

  Really, really. I froze when I heard the words and waited for her to say when.

  Tonight. Followed by but. Perfectly clear.

  Zandy’s voice grew brisk again. “Meet me at 12:30 tomorrow after my tennis lesson? Talk to you soon.”

  My parents were still bustling around the room. They’d heard the message at the same time I did, but they didn’t have a clue what Zandy had just asked me to do. It looked like our emergency plan was going to work.

  I turned my pillow over in frustration. I could not let myself fall asleep. I rolled over on my back and stared up at the ceiling, fighting to keep my eyelids from closing. Then a sliver of light shone through a gap in the doorway, and I looked up to see my door opening slowly.

  “Still awake?” My mom sat down on the bed. “I thought you might be missing Zandy.”

  I sat up and poked a hand out of the covers. She stroked it softly with her fingertips.

  “Big day,” she said.

  “Mmmm,” I agreed. I felt so peaceful, like I was a little kid again.

  “You looked like you were having fun onstage tonight.”

  “Mmmm.” If I didn’t watch it, I’d fall asleep after all.

  “I’m happy to hear that. I worry about how much fun you miss.”

  “I don’t miss anything,” I said sleepily.

  “You missed Amanda’s birthday party last week.”

  Well, of course I did. “I had rehearsal,” I said, but Mom went on like she didn’t hear me.

  “You missed Kim’s party last month.”

  “I had auditions.”

  “It sounds like a disease,” Mom said. “And the results are the same. You’re missing so many things other kids get to do. You had to drop swim team last summer.”

  “I got a really good part.”

  She pulled the comforter up over my arms and patted it in place before she reached over and stroked my cheek. Her hand lay there softly as she asked, “Do you think you spend too much time at the theater?”

  I actually felt my mouth fall open in surprise. What a question for my own mother to ask. I was five years old when I saw my first play. I haven’t wanted to be anywhere but in a theater ever since.

  It wasn’t easy for me to get into acting, not like Zandy. It took more than a year of tryouts until I finally got cast in Alice in Wonderland. I think Zandy was as happy as I was when I got my first part, even though I had no lines. I was just one of the playing cards, but I learned a lot as the Eight of Hearts. By the end of the play, I had become a theater kid, one of the family. How could my mother think I spent too much time at the theater?

  “There’s no place else I want to be,” I said firmly and shivered, despite the warmth of the comforter.

  I waited thirty minutes after my mother left my room before I climbed out the window. The nice thing about living in a one-story house is that climbing out the window’s about as hard as climbing out of a bathtub. In two minutes I had grabbed my bike from beside the house and was on my way. It’s only a ten-minute ride to Zandy’s, but in the dark it’s hard to see the road, so I was glad there was a full moon.

  I wore my bike helmet, because I didn’t want to give anyone a reason to stop me, and heavy denim jeans, because Zandy’s room is on the second floor.

  She was looking for me as I rode up.

  She threw down a pair of leather gloves, and I put them on before I climbed up the rose trellis beneath her window. I only got stuck on the thorns twice. The gloves and my jeans kept me from getting seriously scratched. I’ve only done this once before. Zandy’s never tried it.

  “What happened?” I said as I climbed over the windowsill.

  “Shh,” she whispered and pointed at the wall next to her bed.

  The first time I snuck over, Zandy’s mom heard us talking and came to investigate. Fortunately their house has hardwood floors and we heard her footsteps creaking down the hall toward us. I was under the bed long before she reached us, but Zandy panicked and her mom opened the door to see her standing next to the bed by her nightstand.

  “I was just talking to Beth,” Zandy had said. Her voice sounded like she was confessing to robbing a bank.

  Her mom had looked past her to the phone on the nightstand and said, “I’ll have to take your phone away if you don’t stop calling so late at night. You could wake Beth’s parents.”

  And that was that.

  But we didn’t want to risk another close call, so we figured out how to talk without making any noise.

  It was time to try it. We got into position before we said anything else. Zandy lay in bed under the covers, and I sat on the floor next to her head so we could whisper right into each other’s ear—and I could roll under the bed if we heard any footsteps approaching.

  This time Zandy spoke first. “Sorry I couldn’t sleep over. My dad called.”

  “Is anything wrong?” Zandy and I slept at each other’s house so often, I knew her dad’s phone schedule as well as she did: 8:00 a.m. on the first Saturday of every month. Since he works in Saudi Arabia, there’s a huge time difference. I’d never known him to call her at night.

  “He’s coming to visit next week.”

  I reached up and grabbed her hand and started shaking it like she’d just won a boxing match. “Awesome! When?”

  “He gets in Sunday.”

  “To
morrow?”

  “Yeah.” Zandy dropped my hand and turned onto her back.

  The moonlight made the room so bright I could see her fingers moving as she started twirling a lock of hair. I sat there, watching, as the twirling became faster and faster.

  “How long has it been since you’ve seen him?” I finally asked.

  “Two years and five months.”

  The mattress shook as Zandy rolled over. “I wish I had your parents,” she whispered fiercely.

  “They’re not perfect.”

  “They don’t hate each other. They love you. If you’re a Child-Of-Divorce it’s different.” Zandy was talking like it was funny, but I knew she was deadly serious. “Half the time your parents care more about hurting each other than about what’s important to you. You never know if they love you or just want to use you as another way to get even with each other.”

  “Your mom loves you.” I knew that.

  “Partly,” said Zandy. “Partly she hates my dad.”

  I stared at the moonlit shadows cast by the big tree outside her window. The wind must have picked up. The branches were swaying on the wall.

  I couldn’t imagine not seeing my dad every day—not hearing him call me Scooter.

  “What are you and your dad going to do when he gets here?” I asked.

  “Oh, Beth, I don’t know,” she whispered. “I only saw him once or twice a year before he moved to Saudi Arabia and we never had anything to talk about then. I never know what to say to him when he calls.”

  She started to twirl her hair again.

  “Cinderella!’s still running next week,” I said. “Take him to see you as the Fairy Godmother. He’ll be so impressed by your singing, that’s all he’ll want to talk about.”

  The twirling stopped. “Would that be okay? We wouldn’t really be spending the time together. He’d just be watching me.”

  “Your mom just watches. My parents just watch. It’s what parents do.”