“Who can unfreeze it?” Brianna shouted. “I thought we had a Wi-Fi setup—”
“Casey!” Mr. Levin cried out. “CASEY!”
“I’ll find her,” Harrison said. As he groped his way across the nearly pitch-black stage, his hands met something soft and yielding about chest-high.
“Harrison!” Reese said in a shocked voice.
“You did that on purpose,” Harrison replied.
“CASEY!!!”
Casey heard her name from out in the hallway. She grabbed her bag of baked chips from the vending machine and ran. What could have gone wrong now? Everything was going wrong. Today was dress rehearsal. Everything was supposed to go right!
She burst through a side door into blackness. A flashlight beam caught her in the eye, and a hand closed around her left arm. “It’s me, the Phantom of the Opera,” Charles said. “You need to override the override, or something. Or reprogram Dashiell’s flake-o-meter.”
Casey’s laptop was glowing just inside the main curtain. She carefully made her way there and saw what Dashiell had done. The override was something he had programmed as a kind of exercise. A method of setting the entire cue sheet on automatic. Which made no sense. She quickly reset the cues to manual and cued the houselights.
“Thank you!” Dashiell called out.
“Casey, where were you?” Mr. Levin said, rushing toward her. “This is dress. We’re running twenty-five minutes late. How can we time this show if you’re wandering away?”
Casey put her bag of chips behind her back. “Sorry . . . ”
“Maybe we should just put the snack machine back here,” Reese said. “Then we won’t lose Casey so often.”
“Knock it off, Tinkerbell,” Charles said.
“Reese? Brianna and I would like to work with you briefly on that last number, alone,” Mr. Levin said, heading back onto the stage. “Places!”
“Delighted,” Reese replied. As she turned to follow him, she winked at Kyle.
Kyle ambled backstage, shaking his head. “She is something, huh? I’m sitting there minding my own business and whoops! Hello! Kyle boldly goes where no man has gone before.”
“I doubt that,” Charles said.
As Charles bustled back to the big room, Kyle stood next to Casey, watching Reese. Casey was silent. She felt the desperate urge for chips and took a fistful. She hadn’t talked to Kyle since the night in the village green.
And she hadn’t stopped eating.
She should have been over it by now. Kyle had said hi to her every day in school, he had smiled at her—like nothing was wrong. Like the night in the park was just a friendly walk and not the most amazing night of her life. Like he hadn’t turned her upside down and then shot off to the village green to do the same thing with Reese.
She hadn’t told him that she’d seen him. She had just frozen him out, hoping he would notice. The most infuriating thing was that he hadn’t.
Who else had he done this with? What percentage of the school belonged to Kyle’s private friends-with-benefits club? Or had he settled on Reese for the long term—just used Casey as an appetizer?
Reese was all over the stage, singing her number with such a huge self-satisfied grin that you would think she’d just been given a one-woman show.
“Hey, Case,” Kyle said casually. “Too bad Mr. Michaels doesn’t come here every day, huh?”
“Mm-hm.”
“ ’Sup?”
“Nothing,” Casey said.
“What’s the matter? Are you mad at me?”
Will miracles never cease?
She wasn’t nervous anymore. Nothing about him made her nervous now. She calmly took her headphones off and draped them on her shoulders. “That night? After we . . . you know,” Casey said. “I saw you and Reese.”
“Oh,” Kyle said, his smile drooping. “No wonder you’ve been so quiet.”
“So the answer is, yeah, I’m mad . . .”
“Reese and I had this plan,” Kyle said defensively. “We were going to meet after Brianna’s party. Reese said she wanted to talk about a new idea for the play. She said she had to go home first, because her parents are jerks about her staying out late, so she had to pretend to go to sleep and then sneak out. I didn’t know . . . okay, maybe I suspected . . . I’m stupider than I look, I guess . . . and, well, you know Reese . . . ”
Casey hadn’t been this close to Kyle since that night, and her body was reacting, drinking him up greedily. But he wasn’t the same guy she’d thought he was then. He couldn’t be. She’d made him into something larger than just Kyle. Into some kind of God figure, Father Confessor, boyfriend, lover, all rolled into one. Part of her was still seeing him that way, and neither she nor he deserved that.
“I’m not really mad the way you think I am,” Casey said, trying to get it clear in her own mind. “Okay, yeah, my feelings were hurt when I saw you and Reese. But not as much as I thought they would be. The weirdest thing happened, Kyle. It was like my mind saw all the usual things it would be expected to do—scream, explode, cry, freak—but I wasn’t really feeling angry enough to do any of those things. I was, like, full of relief.”
“Relief?” Kyle said. He looked baffled and maybe a little hurt.
“Look, I knew you had plans with someone else, Kyle. You’d told me so. That was your business. But I also realized you didn’t have to go looking for me after that party. No one else did—just you. I needed someone so badly, Kyle. Someone to talk to, someone who would let me be confused and try to untangle my life. And despite your plans, you listened and asked questions and tried to make me feel good. You did make me feel good. You were kind. I don’t know too many guys who are kind. For the first time I felt safe enough to open up. I’d kept everything back for so long behind lies and silence, and there it was, spilling out. Everything went so fast, and I felt so raw and emotional. Everything we did after that—it was natural. I knew you weren’t faking, or trying to manipulate me. I enjoyed it, Kyle. Even if it didn’t mean what I might have wanted it to mean.”
Kyle took it all in. “I haven’t told anyone, you know.”
“I know,” Casey said. “Thanks for that. Anyway, I learned something. I want to tell people about the accident. I have to. At the right time. After the show. I didn’t think I ever would, but now I know I will.”
“Casey?” Kyle said, struggling to find words. “Since that night I’ve wanted to tell you—”
“Cue three-seventy-two A and B—COME IN, CASEY, THAT’S YOUR CUE, YOU’RE LATE!” Mr. Levin’s voice crackled over her headphones.
“Oh, my God.” Casey slid the phones back over her ears and ran to her console. The musical number had just ended, and Reese had jumped down from the piano. The scene-change cue was late. The turntable was supposed to move, and a flat was supposed to be lowered in the dark.
“Hel-lo?” came Reese’s voice from the stage.
Casey’s laptop screen glowed a red “late” warning. She quickly pressed the enter key, and the warning disappeared. The turntable motor began to hum.
“Whoooa—what the hell?” Reese was tottering, off balance. She windmilled her arms, one of which hit the piano with a loud smack.
Screaming, she fell to the floor. She tried to get up but couldn’t. Her costume had somehow gotten stuck in the turntable groove.
“CASEY!” Mr. Levin shouted. “CANCEL THE CUE!”
Frantically Casey tried to hit the control-alt-delete key combination, but her fingers felt like toes.
From above she heard another familiar hum.
The flat.
It was a backdrop for a new scene, nearly the width of the stage. A huge wooden-framed canvas with a steel bar across the bottom. It was supposed to lower slowly from above when everyone was off the stage. Now its massive frame came into sight just at the same time the turntable was moving Reese directly underneath it.
Casey’s fingers were grimy and shaking, slipping on the keyboard as if she’d never used it.
The fl
at connected with Reese’s right shoulder, hard, and she shrieked.
21
“DO SOMETHING!” BRIANNA SCREAMED.
She ran onto the stage and pushed aside the clot of people around Reese. Reese was on the floor, pinned by the flat. She had managed to get her hands underneath it and was struggling to push it away, but it was way too heavy. Its weight kept her nearly motionless while the turntable continued to move beneath her, pulling at her. Mr. Levin was trying to lift the flat and Brianna joined him.
“You’re hurting me!” Reese wailed.
“Push!” Mr. Levin said. Now Ms. Gunderson, Charles, Harrison, Vijay, and Kyle had wrapped their hands under the frame. “One . . . two . . . three . . . ”
They lifted. The flat rose a few inches, and Brianna pulled Reese free. As they all fell back, the rumbling turntable motor stopped—and as slowly as it came down, the flat rose again.
Casey stepped out from behind the curtain. Her face was ashen.
“A little late,” Reese said through gritted teeth.
“How do you feel?” Mr. Levin asked, kneeling beside her.
“Can you move your upper body?” Harrison asked.
Reese grimaced at Harrison. “Maybe you should help me find out.”
“She’s fine,” Charles said with a laugh.
“I’ll call the school nurse,” Ms. Gunderson said.
Mr. Levin and Ms. Gunderson helped Reese to her feet. She was testing all the parts of her body like a dancer, doing little isolation movements. Brianna looked up into the fly space. The flat was enormous. The fact that Reese got her hands underneath it was probably what had saved her from more serious injury.
“I’m all right,” Reese said, moving her injured arm in a circle. “I’ll probably get a big ugly hideous bruise . . . but the costume will cover it.”
Casey was staring at them from the side of the stage. She looked frightened, as if she were about to cry. “I’m so sorry . . . ”
“Do those headphones work, Casey?” Mr. Levin called out.
“Yes,” Casey squeaked.
Brianna could tell Mr. Levin was furious. But now that Reese was all right, his teacher instincts were taking over. “The show opens tomorrow, and this kind of thing cannot happen. I would like an ironclad reassurance.”
“It won’t happen,” Casey said.
“Let’s run the rest of the show—Reese, you can mark it, take it easy—and if I see one cue even partially late, I’m canceling all performances. Casey, I will see you after rehearsal.”
An hour later the hallways were silent. Casey sat spread-legged on the shiny floor, listening to the distant whir of a vacuum cleaner, thinking about what might have been. Reese could have been seriously hurt. The flat was humongous. Had she been an inch farther, it might have come down on her head.
Mr. Levin had cooled off a bit by the time he lectured her after the rehearsal. But Casey knew what she had done was unforgivable. It could have been much worse. She hadn’t been paying attention. She’d been too wrapped up in Kyle and her personal life.
Kara Chang of Westfield, Connecticut, was all about dedication and concentration. She would have fixed the problem long ago. But Casey Chang was different—way too often she was scared and tentative, like a person with a layer of skin peeled off.
Before the talk with Kyle, Casey hadn’t really understood all this. Now she saw it clearly. She understood why she had made this mistake. She had jumped into this position too early. She hadn’t been ready to be a person again, let alone a stage manager. No wonder Brianna had been so pissed at her. Brianna forced you to be yourself, like it or not. And Casey hadn’t been able to do that. Her self had been buried too deep.
She needed time to dig it out. Time to let a scab form over the shock and grief. To rebuild her trust in herself, so that eventually others could trust her, too. To do nothing except the quiet, normal things. To heal.
She could still get that time. But a person had to give to get. And there was one thing she needed to do.
With careful penmanship, Casey finished up her note. Charles was still inside with the Charlettes, Harrison, and Brianna. Everyone else had left.
Dear Mr. Levin, Ms. Gunderson, and the DC,
First of all, I want to apologize for my mistake. I am so sorry for what happened—Reese, please forgive me. There is no excuse for what I did.
Second, I just want you to know I care about this fantastic play very much and I have made every contribution I could. My only goal has always been to help. So it is with deep thought that I have decided the best thing to do is resign, effective immediately. Dashiell will run the cues much better than I could do, and Charles and the Charlettes will easily pick up the other chores.
These have been two of the most wonderful months of my life. I hope I gave you half as much as you all gave me.
Break a leg. I love you.
Sincerely,
Casey Chang
If she read it one more time, she was going to break out crying.
She signed it, folded it, and put it in an envelope.
The theater was eerily quiet as she walked inside and onto the stage. The houselights were on, and Casey stood there looking at the seats, soaking it in for the last time. From behind her a tune began. Cold Play. “You Belong to Me.” It was coming from the costume/prop room.
She stepped backstage and peeked inside. Charles, Harrison, Brianna, Vijay, and a couple of other Charlettes were sitting at the table. The Afro wigs, which had arrived today, were on the top shelf, the only place they fit. In the center of the table was Charles’s iPod, playing the music on a docking station. On the floor were two buckets full of shiny sequins.
Everyone was sewing sequins onto shirts and pants. As the garments moved, the wall sparkled with light. “What’s this?” Casey asked.
“Costumes for the final scene,” Charles said.
“But the cast doesn’t change costumes for that scene,” Casey said.
“It does now.” Harrison smiled. “We close the show with ‘You Are the Light of the World.’ We’re supposed to send everyone home with hope and happiness.”
“And what says hope and happiness more than sequins?” Charles said with a shrug. He had drawn plans and laid them on the table. The vests were all broad shoulders and angles, ablaze with light.
Casey fiddled with her envelope. “I—I have something I wanted to show you,” she said.
“What is it?” Charles asked distractedly.
“You, um, have to read it,” she said.
Charles held out a needle and thread. “Can it wait?” he asked. “We need another seamstress here.”
The Cold Play song ended and a soft, haunting recording of “Amazing Grace” began.
“Amazing grace, how sweet the sound,
That saved a wretch like me.
I once was lost, but now I’m found,
Was blind, but now I see.”
One by one, the Drama Club members began to sing harmony. Casey heard a sweet, strong voice lift over the others and realized it was the first time she had heard Brianna sing. She was wonderful.
Brianna looked up, deep in thought, and smiled. It was the first time she had smiled at Casey in a week. Maybe a mistake, maybe she was thinking about something else. But it felt good.
The vests were taking shape. The room glowed and hummed. Casey took it all in. It had been a long two months. She was a different person now than on that first day. The Drama Club felt like family to her.
The room felt like home.
Casey folded her envelope, put it in her pocket, and began to sew.
22
From:
To:
Subject: AAAAAAAAAAA
November 16, 5:07 P.M.
rachel
oh my god. IT’S OPENING NIGHT!!!!
i am reduced to writing in all capitals with multiple exclamation points and feeling like someone out of a disney movie and living a
ll the show-biz cliches in the world because that’s what it’s like, and no matter what you do or who you are YOU CAN’T HELP BUT FEEL IT!!!!
the wigs r here. the canes r here. they finally got delivered to the right address. u would not believe the costumes for the final number. reese’s shoulder is bruised and she can’t be quite as flamboyant with that arm, but that’s probably all for the best (do i hear a song? ☺). kyle’s ankle is almost back to normal. harrison is smiling. mr. levin is smiling. ms. gunderson is smiling at mr. levin. IT’S ALL WORKING OUT!
WISH YOU WERE HERE!!!!!!
Mr. Levin’s face went pale when Harrison told everyone the news. “What do you mean, Lori can’t make it?” he said. “We’re going up tonight! She has to!”
“Is it the flu?” Ms. Gunderson asked.
“It’s her parents,” Harrison explained. He could barely get the words out. Lori had called him just this afternoon, a half hour after school. She hadn’t shown up in the auditorium for brushups. When she told him the reason, he thought it was a joke at first. “That time she said she was sick? It wasn’t because she wanted to postpone her parents’ conferences. She wanted to avoid any contact between us and them. They had no idea she was involved in this show. She told them she was staying after school for tutoring. They only found out the truth today, when they saw her script.”
“Why didn’t she just tell them?” Reese asked. “What’s the big deal?”
Harrison shook his head. “They went through the roof when they found out. They think the script is blasphemy. Christ in a Superman shirt, songs with sexy lyrics, clown paint on the disciples’ faces—they have a whole list of reasons.”
“You’ve got to be kidding,” Brianna said. “Godspell is so mainstream. Where have they been since 1972?”
“Have you Googled Godspell?” Dashiell asked. “I’ve seen this kind of stuff. People quoting scripture, foaming at the mouth. To some people, it’s still very controversial.”