I mean, I’d consistently behaved like I was on a level with Iz and Nanette. Doing walkovers in the sand. Acting condescending about Shakespeare and dance classes. Saying I wanted to play Miss Adelaide.
What had I been thinking? These were people who’d been on Broadway, or at the least starred in their school musicals. And let’s get real: what had I done? Danced the blue-dress solo in the West Side Story medley at Miss Delilah’s annual concert.
I rushed out of the dark, air-conditioned theater into the blazing sun. It was strangely quiet outside. The soundproof doors didn’t let anything through. I sat on a stone bench a few yards from the front of the building.
Demi would come outside for me soon, I was sure—and though my face felt hot at the thought of my failure next to his success, I still wanted to feel his arm around me and hear him tell me that I’d been wonderful, that I was wrong about it going badly, that I was Sadye Paulson, and I was going to be famous, and I was a fabulous wondergirl, and Jacob Morales was an idiot if he couldn’t see my talent.
But Demi didn’t come.
And didn’t come.
Maybe he’d been stopped by one of the teachers while coming out. Maybe something happened and he couldn’t get to me.
Or maybe—he wasn’t coming.
Thing was, in all the time I’d spent with Demi, especially since we got our Wildewood acceptances, I’d been thinking of myself as special. As charged with talent. As big.
Demi believed in me, and I’d begun to believe in myself. Only now, after what I’d done—how could I?
(click, shuffle)
Sadye: We’re in the cafeteria, posterity, so forgive the noise levels.
Demi: Me, Nanette, Lyle, Iz, and Sadye are consuming potato products and discussing the Meat Market.
Nanette: Sadye is depressed, so we convinced her to listen to audition horror stories from our disreputable pasts.
Sadye: Darlings, I’m fine, really. I can keep my chin up.
Demi: You were good. It was just an off day.
Sadye: How can it be both?
Demi: I don’t know.
Sadye: It can’t be both.
Demi: Don’t jump on me, darling. I’m trying to say the right thing.
Lyle: It happens to everyone. Auditioning is like a weird skill that’s not even the same as acting.
Nanette: Exactly. There are great actors who audition badly.
Sadye: Then how do they ever get parts?
Lyle: They just do. They get better, or word of mouth gets around, or directors see something in them even though they messed up. Last year, there was a guy--oh, that guy Dean, you see him over there in the black shirt? His voice cracked so bad in his audition he ran off the stage and forgot his sheet music. The piano player had to chase after him. And he got Doody in Grease and, um, let me think, a decent part in South Pacific. So it can happen.
Nanette: When I auditioned for Beauty, I was so nervous I wet my pants a little in the waiting room. Like the seat underneath me was wet.
Iz: Gross!
Nanette: I know. Don’t go telling people.
Lyle: Beauty what?
Sadye: She was in Beauty and the Beast.
Nanette: On Broadway. Anyway, it wasn’t exactly wet, but damp, you know? And I was scared to change seats, and too scared to tell my dad what happened. I didn’t want to go to the bathroom in case they called my name while I was there, so
Demi: Wait, how old were you?
Nanette: Eight. I know. Really too old to be wetting your pants.
Iz: That is so gross. So did you sing wearing wet clothes?
Nanette: I did.
Sadye: And then you got it?
Nanette: I got the understudy. Then later I stepped into it.
Lyle: So there you go. Wet pants and a success story.
Iz: When I tried out for Born Yesterday at my performing arts school, I had too much drool in my mouth. I was halfway through the scene we were supposed to do, and I realized there was a string of drool that went like, all the way from my mouth to almost my knee. I am dead serious.
Demi: What did you do?
Iz: I pretended to drop my script and wiped it off. But I was so sure I wasn’t going to get the part.
Sadye: But she did. She told me she played--what’s the character called?
Iz: Billie Dawn.
Lyle: Another success story with bodily fluids. See, Sadye? It’ll be fine. You didn’t even lose control of your functions.
Sadye: Thank goodness for small miracles.
Lyle: My first year at Wildewood, I was only like, fourteen, and I went up on my lines in a monologue. I was trying out for The Front Page and I--I don’t even remember what speech I was doing, but I had no idea what came next. Just stood there, stuttering, until the director asked me if I wanted to take it again from the top.
Demi: And did you?
Lyle: I would have--because you’ve got to get back on the horse--only I couldn’t remember the beginning of it anymore, either. I was a complete blank. So they said “Thank you very much” and sent me out.
Sadye: Did you get the part?
Lyle: No way. I was barely in anything that whole first year.
Sadye: That’s not encouraging!
Lyle: Yes, it is. Because look, here I am. I did five shows last year, and no one remembers what happened back then. Except me.
Demi: Do you feel better now, Sadye? Tell us you feel better.
Sadye: Okay, okay. I feel better.
If you let me have the rest of your French fries.
Demi: Good.
Sadye: I’m as better as I can feel, anyway.
(click)
THAT NIGHT we saw an all-teacher performance of The Importance of Being Earnest, done in the black box theater. Theo was there, of course, and so was James. But I ignored them both after my humiliation at the auditions. It was easier to stay with Demi and Lyle, who liked me for my personality rather than for my (at this point highly questionable) talent or (apparently limited) sex appeal. All I wanted was not to think about how badly I’d done and how stupid I must have looked.
After the show we stood outside in the crickety night, leaning against the brick wall of the building and watching the Wilders mill around. None of us was ready to go back to the dorms since there was nearly an hour before curfew.
“There’s an all-night convenience store two blocks off campus,” Lyle mentioned. “They’ll sell me beer, if you guys feel like making a run.”
“Do you have an ID?” asked Demi.
“No. They’re lax. If they didn’t sell to kids from Wildewood, they’d have hardly any business. What do you say?”
I shook my head. I could tell the invitation was meant as a temptation for Demi, not me. Besides, I’m not much of a drinker.
Demi tilted his head at Lyle, looking out of narrowed eyes. “Isn’t that the sort of escapade that can get you kicked out of here?”
“Actually,” said Lyle, “this guy on my hall got booted a couple months ago for having a bottle of whiskey in his locker. But darling, wasn’t it you who said life is a cabaret?”
“That doesn’t mean I’m risking expulsion.”
“No way is Farrell going to catch us, and if he does, he won’t do anything,” said Lyle. “He’ll just take our beer and drink it himself.”
Demi looked tempted, and Lyle went on:
“I’ve got the run down to eighteen minutes, door-to-door, if you go over the stone wall at the south end of campus. We timed it with a stopwatch last term.”
I thought Demi was going to say yes, because he’s never one to turn down adventure, but then Blake came up to us.
Blake, who had a chain of bright blue beads around his neck, surfer-style; Blake, who had ignored Demi all day, flirting with girls and boys alike in the front row, where we could see everything he did; gorgeous, selfish Blake came up and flirtatiously banged his shoulder into Demi’s. “Hey, where you been?” he asked.
Like we hadn’t been down the t
able from him at dinner, and behind him in the theater.
Demi turned on his smile. “Bunburying.”
(This was a joke from The Importance of Being Earnest, and I should explain it since there was a lot of Bunburying going on at Wildewood. In the play, whenever a guy named Algernon wants to escape social obligations, he claims he’s got to go and visit his sick friend Bunbury, who doesn’t exist. Then he goes and does something he finds more entertaining than whatever he was obligated to do, and he calls this whole evasive maneuver “Bunburying.” During the intermission that night, Lyle told us that they’d studied the play in English and that some people interpret the whole Bunbury motif as homosexual. Like, to Bunbury is to go off and have homosexual adventures while lying to your family about it—it’s a code. So it means slagging off some obligation, or it means guys fooling around with each other, or it means both. Great word.)
Blake laughed and said, “I heard you can get up on the roof of the dance building, want to go check it out?”
“You used to be able to, but you can’t anymore,” said Lyle. “They alarmed the door at the top of the stairway ever since they found bottles up there.”
Blake ignored him. So did Demi. “I’m in!” he said, running off across the quad. “Bet I beat you there!”
Blake laughed and chased Demi over the grass.
They were gone.
Lyle and I stood there. “Sorry,” I finally muttered.
As if I could speak for Demi. And meaning, Sorry, he doesn’t want you; Sorry he’s so shallow; Sorry, I know you’re worth a thousand Blakes; Sorry, he’s never been anywhere like this where he can be out of the closet all the time and I think it’s gone to his head; Sorry, it’s like this in the world, with the beautiful people running off with each other. And also, Sorry, I wanted him to stay, too.
“You know what?” Lyle said thoughtfully, looking off in the direction they’d gone, although we couldn’t see them any more. “It ain’t over till the fat boy sings.”
TWENTY MINUTES after I got into bed, my roommates came in and woke me up. Candie was in a tizz because Nanette had told her there was no way she could sing “Memory” for her audition the next day. “Tell me why, again?” sniffed Candie plaintively, as she changed into a nightgown.
“It’s unprofessional,” said Nanette. “You can’t sing a song from the show you’re auditioning for. No one does it. You’re not supposed to.”
“But I didn’t know they were doing Cats. They didn’t tell us what they were doing till we got here!”
“You try to find out,” said Nanette. “That’s what I did. Or you look on the Web and see what they did last year and the year before, because you know they won’t repeat those.”
“You knew your agent, who knew Morales,” put in Iz, walking through the room naked on her way into the shower. “I’ve been here two other summers and even I didn’t know what they were doing.”
“Do you have any other sheet music?” I asked Candie.
She shook her head.
“Okay, let’s be practical,” said Nanette. “What else can you sing?”
“Nothing.” Candie buried her face in her pillow.
“You’re a soprano,” pushed Nanette. “You must know ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow.’ Sing that.”
“I don’t think I know it. Not really.”
“Or ‘The Sound of Music’?”
Candie shook her head.
“You don’t know ‘The Sound of Music,’ are you joking?”
“No.”
“There must be something. ‘I Could Have Danced All Night’? A song from Jekyll & Hyde ?”
“Not a capella,” said Candie. “I can’t sing those a capella.”
“Aw, leave her alone,” I moaned. “She can sing ‘Memory’ if she wants to.”
“Only if she wants to seem like she doesn’t know what she’s doing.”
“There’s nothing else she can do.”
Candie was silent.
“I was just trying to help,” huffed Nanette, getting into bed and pulling up the covers.
THE NEXT DAY of monologues and songs was like the first. A string of faces, all nervous.
Iz was fiery and cute onstage—much more attractive than she was up close, and she sang “Sandra Dee” with that gritty belt, and so much polish to the jokes and gestures that you could tell she’d done it in a real show the summer before.
The night before, Blake and Demi had failed to get on the roof of the dance building, as Lyle had predicted, but they’d kissed in the staircase until curfew. Which was probably Blake’s plan in the first place.
“Just kissing?” I whispered to Demi as we sat in the audience.
Demi slapped my hand. “I’ve only known the boy two days! I’m saving myself for marriage.”
“Uh-huh. Yeah.”
“We have a whole lovely summer stretching out in front of us,” said Demi dreamily. “Me and Blake, Blake and me.”
I hoped he was right.
And then, if I’m being honest, I hoped he wasn’t.
CANDIE WAS number 115—quite near the end—and she sat between me and Iz after lunch, when Demi went to sit with Blake. Her pink skin was sweaty, and she’d done her white-blond hair in a pair of pigtails that made her look like a farm girl. She didn’t say a word, and I thought about how hard it must be to be so close to last, watching all those talented people take the stage.
Sitting there, I felt a kinship with her. Candie and me, we were the also-rans here. Neither of us was exactly pretty, and neither of us could compete with girls like Iz—much less with girls like Nanette. We were the ones who should probably pack up our dreams, take them home with us at the end of the summer, and stick them down in our family’s basements.
I resolved to be nicer to her even though she didn’t thrill me—even though her needy spirit grated on me and made me want to shake her—because I was sure she felt the same way I did.
Candie’s group was called, and I sat through two back-to-back renditions of “Out Tonight” from Rent, followed by one guy who attempted to sing a song from Avenue Q in which he pretended his two hands were Muppets, and a lame fellow whose singing was so bad that I don’t even know what he sang.
Candie went up and stood center stage. “I forgot my sheet music,” she said. “Or, well. Actually, I changed my song.”
“That’s all right,” came Morales’s thin, high voice. “Begin with the monologue, please.”
Candie’s speech was from The Diary of Anne Frank— and thing was, all her lack of self-consciousness—her Jekyll obsession, her ex-boyfriend hang-up, her awkward style, the fact that being around her was like being around an open, gaping wound and you wanted to beg her, please, to bandage herself up—it was brilliant onstage. She was honest.
And then she sang. A capella, she launched into “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
Now, if you’ve ever had to sing that song in a school assembly, you’ll know that it is really, really difficult. It goes way low down, and very high. The “rockets red glare” part is a disaster for most people. But Candie—her voice swooped up to the top notes like a dove. She tipped her soft, round face up to the balcony and raised her arms as she got to the end, every note creamy and clear.
“Well,” muttered Iz. “She’ll give Nanette a run for her money, now won’t she?”
THE CAST LISTS were posted the next morning at eight a.m. on a kiosk in the center of campus. After we looked at them, we were supposed to proceed to breakfast and our first day of regular classes and rehearsals.
Nanette was too cool to go at eight and said she was going to take advantage of the empty bathroom, but Candie, Iz, and I ran out early. When we got there, the five posted lists were obscured by a crowd of people—nearly all of Wildewood was already there to see. The girls had no makeup, the boys had bed head. Everyone was squealing and jumping in glee, talking and clutching each other’s arms. “We’re together!” “I knew you’d get a good part!” “I’m so excited!” “It’s g
onna be a great show.”
I looked for my name first on the list for Little Shop of Horrors (which has such a small cast that there are no bad parts), then on Bye Bye Birdie next to it.
Not on either one.
Then Cats, which wasn’t a show I wanted, but which was such a dance-centered project I actually had a decent chance of getting a good part.
Not there either.
Then Show Boat.
No.
I looked again at Cats, thinking maybe I’d missed myself, since I wasn’t used to seeing Sadye in print.
But no.
People were all around me, pushing and exclaiming. My throat closed up as I moved my way to the end of the bulletin board so I could scan the list for Midsummer.
There it was. Sadye Paulson.
I was playing a character I didn’t even remember, though I’d read the play in English class. Peter Quince.
I was playing a man.
Apparently, I wasn’t even recognizably female.
I wanted to be happy for my friends, but tears had made my cheeks wet before I even realized I was crying.
I tried to remember what Morales said about humility; about subduing the ego for the good of the show.
I tried to think that doing Shakespeare would be wonderful training for my career. I told myself I still had a long summer of acting classes and voice lessons and rehearsals—and that at least I was out of Ohio.
It just seemed so unfair, not to have what I’d been dreaming about for months.
Not to have a chance.
I could see Demi on the other side of the crowd, jumping up and down. He was playing the title character in Bye Bye Birdie—but I didn’t go up with my congratulations. I knew I should, but I choked on the words and turned back toward the dorm.
That was my first mistake with him.
NANETTE WAS in our room, drying her hair. “How’d it go?” she asked.
I swallowed hard. “You wanna know what you got?”
“Don’t tell me!”
“All right . . .”
“No, do tell me,” she begged. And for once her hard face looked open.
“Julie in Show Boat.”
It was a big part. Nanette danced around the room.