“No, that’s okay.”
“It looked good on you,” the sales girl said with a shrug.
Arden shook her head. “It’s not really worth it.” And she followed her boyfriend into the cold outside.
Things with Chris weren’t always like this
Arden had nursed a dormant crush on Chris Jump through most of freshman and sophomore years. She wasn’t obsessed with him in the way she’d been with some other boys—like Ellzey, for example. But Chris was tall and handsome and very much at the center of the theater crowd, even when they were freshmen. So she was vaguely interested.
And then he got cast as Abélard in the play adaptation of the love letters of Héloïse and Abélard, and she was a goner.
Arden got to watch Chris as Abélard most days after school, because she did stage crew: costuming, lighting, scenery, props, whatever else was needed backstage. She’d discovered stage crew at the beginning of freshman year, when Lindsey dragged her along to a drama club meeting. Lindsey never went back after that first time—as with so many other things, her interest flared and then disappeared within the course of a few days—but Arden was hooked. She saw it as a personal victory when a play went off with all the actors wearing exactly what they were supposed to be wearing, walking on stage at exactly the moments they were supposed to make their entrances.
This wasn’t just an inflated sense of self-importance. If she weren’t there with her walkie-talkie, muttering instructions, each actor would literally have no idea what was happening in the play outside of his or her own scenes. If she didn’t run onstage when the lights went dark to quickly reposition the scenery into the spots that she had marked with glow-in-the-dark tape, then the scenery would not get moved, and classroom scenes would take place in monasteries, kitchen scenes in forests. It made her feel like she mattered.
Plus, she made good friends through drama club, even before there was anything romantic between her and Chris. Arden clicked quickly with Kirsten, who, as an excellent singer and a mediocre-at-best actress, got major parts in all the musicals and bit parts in all the straight plays. Arden took a little while longer to connect with Naomi, who did stage crew with her and had a classic “don’t notice me” backstage personality, until she got comfortable with you. But after Arden and Naomi stayed six hours after school one time in order to rush a stage backdrop to completion, that friendship, too, was solidified.
Freshman year, Arden’s parents came to her first play. Afterward her dad complimented her, and then he said, “Maybe next year you’ll even make it on stage!” She hadn’t invited him to any performances since then. He didn’t get it. Arden’s ultimate dream, for when she was a senior, was to be the stage manager, the one who called the entire play. Like God, basically.
Last year, sophomore spring, Arden was doing tech for Abélard and Héloïse. It was based on a real-life doomed romance of a couple in twelfth-century France. Héloïse was a beautiful young woman, and Abélard was her teacher … until they fell in love. Nobody approved of their union, so Héloïse was forced to join a nunnery and Abélard became a monk. For the last twenty years of Abélard’s life, the two wrote passionate love letters back and forth, forbidden to ever see each other again. They loved each other and nobody else except for God up until the day they died. Arden thought this was one of the greatest love stories she had ever heard. She would kill for a life like that—minus the bit where she had to become a nun.
Mr. Lansdowne’s decision to cast Chris as Abélard angered every theater guy in the junior and senior classes. There was a lot of indignant gossiping about it backstage, and, since Arden was always backstage, she overheard it all.
“The leads are supposed to go to the upperclassmen,” Brad griped. “Everyone knows that.”
“Mr. Lansdowne just cast Chris because he’s cute,” bitched Eric. “He’s not even that good an actor.”
Actually, Chris was cute and a good actor, but whatever.
Shortly after rehearsals for the play kicked off, Chris started dating Natalia. Natalia played one of the nuns, which, from what Arden knew of Natalia, was basically the opposite of typecasting.
Natalia and Chris went together like fire and gasoline. When they weren’t on stage, or making out, they were screaming at each other. Then Natalia would stomp off to weep in the girls’ room, and the rest of the nuns would run after her, and Chris would complain to Arden.
“She’s just so crazy,” Chris would say.
“I know,” Arden would sympathize.
“It’s all about the drama with her,” Chris said one time, a hammer hanging idly from his hand while Arden pieced together scenery. “It’s like she wants to fight. We just spent half an hour arguing over which side of the stage was stage right and which side was stage left.”
“The left side from the audience’s perspective is stage right,” Arden said.
“That’s what I told her! But she refused to listen. So I looked it up on my phone, which obviously confirmed that you and I are right, and then she started crying because I was being ‘mean.’”
“You were not being mean,” Arden said, taking the hammer from Chris’s hands since he was not doing anything with it except swinging it around, which had the distinct potential to do more harm than good. “It’s not like you were telling her she was wrong in order to hurt her feelings. You just wanted her to know so she wouldn’t sound silly in front of anybody else.”
“Exactly,” Chris said. “Thank you.” He followed Arden around to the other side of the backdrop she was working on. “So how do I get her to stop fighting with me? What should I do so we can have a conversation without it turning into her crying? Should I just agree with her, even when she says something totally wrong, like that stage left is to the audience’s left?”
All told at that point, Arden’s dating experience included two kisses at school dances, one kiss at a bar mitzvah, and one week of “dating” Benedict Swindenhausen when they were in the seventh grade. She had no idea why Chris thought she was some kind of relationship expert, but she liked the role.
“I think you have to respect where she’s coming from,” Arden said, thinking it over. “You can’t just say, ‘No, you’re wrong.’ Say, ‘I see why you might think that stage left is to your left. That would make sense. I was also surprised when I learned that wasn’t the case.’ Then it seems like you’re on her side, you know?”
“That’s smart,” Chris said. “You’re smart.”
“Thank you.” Arden blushed a little.
“You give me hope that not all girls are total drama queens,” Chris said.
“Not me,” Arden said. “Not a drama queen.” She held up the hammer. “Just a hammer queen, I guess.”
That sounded stupid, but Chris laughed anyway.
“Why are you with her, anyway?” Arden asked. “If you make each other so unhappy, what’s the point?”
Chris just shook his head. “I don’t know. I can’t explain it.”
Arden felt envy pulsate in her chest. She wanted that: the sort of love that you can’t explain. Like Héloïse and Abélard. It didn’t make sense to anybody else but them—but that didn’t make it any less true.
But apparently what Chris and Natalia had wasn’t really love, since a couple weeks later, during intermission between the first and second acts of their final performance of Héloïse and Abélard, she dumped him.
It was five minutes before Chris was about to make his entrance, and he was nowhere to be seen. “Find him!” ordered the disembodied voice of the stage manager through Arden’s headset.
Eventually she tracked him down behind a rack of coats in the costume closet. He was sitting on the floor in his monk outfit, his face buried in a floor-length fur cloak.
“Is everything okay?” Arden asked, crouching down beside him.
He shook his head and rubbed his eyes. Arden waited for him to speak. Finally he got out, “She broke up with me.” He sucked in his breath and bit down on his knuckles.
/> Arden pushed her way through the coats so she was sitting on the floor next to Chris. She rubbed his arm. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“Where is he?” demanded the stage manager’s voice in her ear.
“This will be for the best, though,” Arden said. “I know it doesn’t feel like it right now. But she wasn’t making you happy. You fought all the time. Everything was an argument. Remember?”
Chris nodded, slowly. Then he protested, “But sometimes we were happy,” and his face crumpled again.
Arden put her arm around him. “Not often enough, Chris. And not happy enough. You deserve better. You’re a great guy, and you should have a girl who appreciates you.”
“Not that great, I guess.” He gave a sad little laugh. “I’m sitting in some ladies’ coats when I should be preparing to make my entrance. But, Arden, how can I go out there?”
“Because you’re an actor,” Arden said. “Because you’re the real deal. You’re talented, and you’re driven, and you’re thoughtful—”
The next thing she knew, he was kissing her.
When they pulled apart, Arden was breathing hard. So that’s what it feels like to be part of a stage kiss.
“Chris. Why did you … What was that? I mean, thank you. Wow. But … where did that even come from?”
“From eight weeks of dating the wrong girl,” he replied. He stood up and smoothed his hair. “Arden,” Chris said, “will you go out with me?”
Arden stood up, too. After a lifetime of unrequited crushes and secret stalking, how did the answer turn out to be so easy?
“Yes,” she said. She stood on tiptoe to kiss him again. “I’d love to go out with you.”
He put his hands on her shoulders and held her back from him a little, so he could look in her eyes. “But no drama,” he said. “I can’t take any more drama.”
“Don’t worry,” she said. “From here on out, all your drama will be strictly on stage. Speaking of…” She looked pointedly at her watch.
“All right, stage crew.” He gave a little salute. “I’ve got it.” His face broke into a grin, and she could see his dimple. Even if Mr. Lansdowne did cast him just because he was cute, that seemed like a good enough reason. “I’ll see you after the play,” Chris said, and, after one more kiss, he jogged off, just in time to make his entrance.
Arden followed after him at a more sedate pace, running her fingers over her lips, trying to make sure that this was real. She, Arden, backstage girl, nice girl, perennially single, lonely girl, had somehow snagged the leading man. And they’d stayed together ever since.
Stalking people, take one
The last guy Arden had been obsessed with, in her pre-Chris days last year, had been Ellzey. Yes, Ellzey of trying-to-smoke-pot-on-Matt-Washington’s-patio fame. The thing was, Ellzey was a tremendous singer. He was in show choir and sang a solo of Billy Joel’s “And So It Goes” so beautifully that it brought tears to Arden’s eyes every time she heard it, which was often, since she liked to watch online videos of the choir when she was supposed to be doing her homework. She had thought Ellzey was the most romantic guy in the world, or at least in Cumberland. There was no way he could sing a song with such depths of emotion if he weren’t.
Ellzey seemed to have a passing knowledge of Arden’s existence, mostly that she was the girl who said “great job” after every single chorus performance. Also one time he complimented her on her Harry Potter tote bag, which she then made a point of carrying to school every day, until Lindsey told her, “That bag is filthy. Dumbledore is rolling in his grave. Put it out to pasture, Arden.”
One Saturday night last March, Arden, Lindsey, and Naomi slept over at Kirsten’s house to celebrate her sixteenth birthday. At the time Naomi was going out with one of the guys in show choir, so she had insider information about choral activities. She happened to mention that a bunch of the guys in choir were also having a sleepover. That very night! She didn’t know exactly who was there. The guy she was dating, Douglas, for sure. Alex, Ellzey, maybe Carter?
“We should go,” Arden said.
“To the boys’ slumber party?” Kirsten asked, wrapping her long blond hair around a curling iron. Kirsten’s hair was her pride and joy. The rest of them called it “mermaid hair,” and while Kirsten would shoot down any other compliments sent her way (“No, I swear, these pants just make me appear skinny”; “Honestly, I had my dad explain the reading to me—I couldn’t finish it, either”; “I’m actually way worse at piano than should even be possible”), she accepted “mermaid hair” with the calm acknowledgment of one who knew this praise to be undeniable.
“Yes, to the boys’ slumber party,” Arden said.
“Why?” Kirsten asked.
“To say hi,” Arden explained.
“Why?” Kirsten asked again, holding her hair in place. “I just mean, like, what’s the point?”
“What’s the point of anything? Like, what’s the point of curling your hair?” Lindsey countered. Arden knew that Lindsey meant her question innocently—Lindsey genuinely did not understand the point of curling hair—but Kirsten glared at Lindsey as though this were a personal attack.
“Wouldn’t you like to see your boyfriend?” Arden asked Naomi.
“Douglas isn’t exactly my boyfriend,” Naomi said. “I mean, we haven’t had the ‘are we boyfriend and girlfriend’ talk or anything.”
“Obviously we should crash the boys’ slumber party,” Lindsey volunteered. Arden threw her a grateful look, while Kirsten and Naomi both frowned. They were not exactly Lindsey Matson fans, since most of the time they wanted to gossip about boys and try on each other’s jewelry, while Lindsey almost never wanted to gossip about boys, and last year she’d sold the small amount of jewelry that she owned in order to purchase absurdly expensive “performance” running shoes. She was here as a package deal with Arden, and all of them knew it—except for maybe Lindsey herself.
“What else is there to do?” Lindsey reasoned.
“We could stay here and watch a movie,” Kirsten suggested.
Arden felt deep in her bones that she was not put on this earth to sit in her pajamas in Kirsten’s finished basement and watch a movie.
By the time she’d convinced her three friends to go to the boys’ sleepover, it was one a.m. “Whose house are they at?” she asked Naomi.
Naomi shook her head. “I don’t know. Not Douglas’s.”
“Will you text him and ask where they are?”
Naomi scrunched up her face. “Um … we don’t totally have that kind of relationship yet?”
They decided to try Alex’s house first. Alex’s house was big, and he didn’t have any younger siblings who might get underfoot, so this seemed like a likely location for a sleepover. Plus he lived only a few blocks away from Kirsten’s house. Kirsten scribbled a note that said, cryptically, We’ll be back, and left it on her kitchen table as they silently snuck out of the house. At the last minute, Arden grabbed one of the helium balloons that Kirsten’s stepmom had festively tied to the fridge. “When we show up, it’ll be like a parade,” she whispered.
But when they got to Alex’s, every window was dark. Either the boys weren’t there, or they were already fast asleep.
“I can’t imagine they’ve gone to bed already,” Naomi said as the girls stood in Alex’s driveway, staring up at the house. “Douglas said that last time they had a sleepover, they stayed up until four in the morning singing the entirety of Les Miz.”
“Are you kidding me?” Arden shrieked.
“You just described Arden’s most dearly held sexual fantasy,” Lindsey explained.
“Maybe they’re at Ellzey’s,” Kirsten suggested.
“Does anybody know where Ellzey lives?” asked Naomi.
Arden raised her hand. “I do.”
“Wait, how?” Naomi asked.
“Because she’s his stalker,” said Lindsey.
“Should we tie the balloon to Alex’s mailbox?” Arden asked before they left. ??
?So they know that we were here?”
“Let’s not,” Naomi said quickly. She looked concerned.
Ellzey’s house was nearly a half-hour walk away, but it was a surprisingly warm night for March, and none of them was tired. When they entered his driveway, they noticed a light still on, on the second floor of the house, and three cars parked outside.
“That’s where they are,” Arden whispered.
They stared reverentially at the lit window. Arden imagined that she could hear Ellzey’s gentle tenor voice floating out and down to her. She felt momentarily like she was in Romeo and Juliet, the balcony scene. Only she would be Romeo, in this situation.
“Now what?” Kirsten asked.
“We have to get their attention,” Arden said.
“Are you sure you can’t just text Douglas?” Lindsey asked Naomi.
Even in the moonlight, it was clear that Naomi was blushing. “No way.”
So they tried throwing rocks at the window. This had no impact. Either because they had no aim and the majority of their rocks missed their mark, or because the boys were singing so loudly they were deaf to the thumping of rocks against their house. Maybe both.
“You’re an athlete,” Arden said to Lindsey as she hurled another pebble from Ellzey’s gravel driveway and it went flying off into the distance. “You’re supposed to be good at this stuff.”
“I’m on the track team,” Lindsey said, her next stone falling ten feet short of its mark. “There’s no throwing in track.”
“Think of this as cross-training,” Arden said.
When their arms grew tired, Lindsey suggested singing. “Like sirens in a Greek myth,” she explained.
“I can’t really carry a tune,” said Naomi. “That’s why I do stage crew.”
“Pull it together, Naomi,” snapped Lindsey.
Kirsten, of course, was already belting out her song from the fall production of Cabaret.
Together, the girls sang “And So It Goes,” with Arden trying her hand at Ellzey’s solo. It seemed like if anything would draw him to the window, that would work. But still, she saw no Ellzey.