Prologue

THEY SAY IF YOU STARE AT THE PHOTOS LONG enough, you’ll see yourself. You can’t miss them. They cover an entire wall of the school lobby, every year since 1907. The ones way up top are hard to see, but they’re all boys in togas, animal skins, and drag. Often a mysterious blurry bear lurks in the background, supposedly the ghost of a murdered kid but probably some forgotten joke. It was a boys’ school then, and when girls showed up a couple of decades later, the Masque & Wig Society became the Drama Club.

Every few years a newspaper will do a feature on this. They’ll say most high schools have walls for sports teams, debate teams, math squads, etc. But, they’ll conclude, Ridgeport High is “not most high schools.” And they’re right. Okay, if you look real hard, you’ll find a small dusty cabinet near the boys’ room that contains a few trophies and a list of track records intact since Lamar Williams high-jumped 6’ 1¼” in 1985. I guess Kyle Taggart’s football records will be added someday, but no one seems to be rushing (ha ha). But the lobby wall, the school’s prime show-off spot, is reserved for something else, something much more important.

Ridgeport is the kind of place where Stephen Sondheim is sung in the hallways, The Light in the Piazza is on everyone’s playlists, and you can spark a heated argument by mentioning the name Martin Pakledinaz. (He’s a costume designer. I didn’t know that either.) Kids give impromptu concerts in the halls, and teachers sing backup. Even Mr. Ippolito, the custodian, does a mean doo-wop second tenor and can recite Shakespeare. He keeps the photos spotless. Especially the Shrine, a glassed-in photo display of the five RHS alums who went on to win Tony Awards.

Brianna Glaser swears she was, in a previous life, the girl playing in Annie Get Your Gun in a 1966 photo; the girl doesn’t resemble her at all, but it’s hard to disagree with Brianna. Harrison Michaels is the guy playing Zeus in some 1931 play. Reese Van Cleve is, of course, the babe in 1989’s Pajama Game with the 300-watt smile, long legs, and big boobs—a girl who, depending on who you talk to, went on to become a backup singer for Madonna or an Internet porn star.

Me? I didn’t pay much attention to the photos at first. For one thing, there were no Asian faces for, oh, seventy years. Brianna insisted that didn’t matter and that I was being close-minded, but I think I’m a realist. People see what they want to see. I mean, we all dream of a perfect place, where everyone gets you. Where you can be exactly who you want to be and not worry about making an ass of yourself or pleasing someone else. Some people find it in teams and social cliques. Some have to travel to an imaginary wizard school or through a hidden wardrobe or on a Kansas tornado. In Ridgeport, people find it in the Drama Club.

As for me, I had to work a little harder. A few weeks after I turned sixteen, in another life in Connecticut, everything changed. Nothing I knew or believed made any sense. On that day I stopped being Kara Chang. I was no longer the good girl, the Organized One, the class president and yearbook editor who could do Whatever She Put Her Mind To. After the school year ended, Mom and I moved away. We had to. Dad probably would have wanted us to stay, but he’d walked out on us three years earlier, so his opinion didn’t count. So, of all the places to move, why did Mom choose Ridgeport, Long Island? I don’t know, probably something like water quality or school SAT scores or the availability of good nursing jobs. I don’t think it was because of the magic that’s here. That was for me to find out. And I did. I realized that in a town where the stage was reality, I could become a new person.

Of course, I couldn’t go too far with this. Mom would have had a heart attack if I’d called myself Ethel or Bernadette or Idina, so I stretched to the limits of my available options. I introduced myself to people as K.C., which isn’t exactly a lie, but just as I hoped, they spelled it the way it sounds.

And that’s how I became who I am today, Casey.

I became one of those people who need to escape themselves to find themselves. Only I didn’t do it via a trip to Oz or Hogwarts or Narnia. I didn’t even expect to do it through the Drama Club.

Then I ran into the hurricane known as Brianna Glaser.