The Fall Musical #1

Tomorrow is DRESS REHEARSAL. Are we ready? Hell no! Do not try to take the train here (were you going to?) If you don’t hear from me, it means I’m hiding in humiliation. Thanks for sending the Shakespearean insults, you may have to use them on me after this disaster is over, you benighted addle-pated clotpole.

Till then,

Judas

“Play those keys, honey!” Reese shouted the final spoken line of the song “Turn Back, O Man” in a Mae West accent while flinging her legs over the upright piano, barely missing a square hit on Lori’s left temple. Her feet landed on either shoulder of Kyle, who was pantomiming playing the tune.

“Urf,” Kyle said, looking up directly into Reese’s twilight zone.

“Break!” Mr. Levin called out from the darkness of the house.

Harrison took a deep breath. They were supposed to run the play straight through. But what had started as a dress rehearsal had degenerated into Reese Van Cleve Night. She’d been kicking higher, singing louder, and acting broader than everyone else in the cast. They’d had to stop the run-through twice. They hadn’t even had a chance to iron out the problems in “All for the Best.” Kyle had such a mental block against the choreography. Harrison’s shins were covered with scars from his wrong-sided kicks.

“Uh, Reese, where did that move come from?” Brianna asked from the house.

“Like it?” Reese said brightly.

“Uh . . . no, Reese,” Mr. Levin said. “Not appropriate, sorry.”

Charles, who had emerged from backstage to investigate the commotion, let out a scream. “Oh! We’re doing that kind of play?”

Reese swung her legs around and jumped off the piano. “The true professionals are never understood,” she grumbled to Harrison.

“Maybe you should stop practicing your Tony speech and actually interact with the other actors,” Harrison said.

Reese eyed him up and down. “Maybe I need something to interact with, honey. And I don’t mean a platter full of moussaka.”

Hopping onstage, Mr. Levin pulled Reese aside. He liked to keep his comments private with each actor, but Harrison could make out a phrase here and there: “It’s an ensemble piece . . . give and take . . . too late for surprises . . .” Reese was not taking it well. From the expression on her face, she looked as if he were telling her to wear curlers and sing in Swedish.

Then, with a barely audible fwoomp, the entire auditorium went black.

All conversation stopped.

“Dashiell?” Mr. Levin called out. “What happened?”

“Sorry, I was testing the override!” Dashiell cried from the projection booth. “I’ll set it back . . . wait. Aw, scheiss. It froze.”

“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 flat connected with Reese’s right shoulder, hard, and she shrieked.