Kyle
“Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is one of Tennessee Williams’s most famous plays,” Benjy told Kyle. “They made a movie out of it, too. Have you seen it?”
“Cat on a hot tanned what?” Kyle said distractedly.
She lay back on the chaise longue and admired her own awesome tan. Her legs looked especially stunning against the pale turquoise color of her new bikini, which she had conveniently gotten for free during last Saturday’s shoplifting spree at the mall. Kyle had never shoplifted before, but her friends Ash and Priscilla had talked her into it. It had been a blast, like playing an Xbox game, for real. It had also been surprisingly easy, due to the apparent epidemic of brain-dead security guards.
“Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” Benjy repeated. “We have a test on it in our lit class tomorrow. Remember?”
“Oh, yeah.” Kyle glanced sideways at Benjy, who was sitting cross-legged on the pool deck surrounded by a sea of notebooks, pens, and books, like some geek in a Staples ad. With his brown eyes and tall, lean frame, he looked a little like Beau, except for his I’m-too-much-of-a-nerd-to-bother-with-my-appearance vibe. His wavy light brown hair was long-ish and unruly, his gold-rimmed glasses were crooked, and his Korn T-shirt (really? Korn?) and khaki shorts were wrinkled, as though he hadn’t quite gotten the hang of laundry yet.
Still, he was cute. Correction: he would be cute, if he wasn’t her stepbrother.
“You did read it, right?” Benjy asked her.
Kyle shrugged nonchalantly. “Can’t you just tell me what it’s about?”
“Yeah, I’m sure that’s what your mom and my dad had in mind when they hired me to be your tutor.”
“It’ll be our little secret, then.”
Kyle still couldn’t believe that her mother and Beau had given her an ultimatum: show up for these biweekly tutoring sessions and reach a 3.0 average by the end of the trimester, or she would lose her car, phone, and computer privileges for the entire following trimester. Were they serious, threatening her like that? Unfortunately, there was nothing she could do but go along with their diabolical plan. Or pretend to go along with it, anyway, until she could think of a better alternative.
Benjy picked up his dog-eared copy of the play and began leafing through it. “Okay, so, did you read any of it?”
“Yeah.”
“How far did you get?”
“I don’t know. Some girl named Maddy was bitching out some guy named Brett.”
“Maggie. And Brick. They were probably having one of their big fights.”
“About what?”
“About his drinking. About his messed-up relationship with his dad. About his psycho sister-in-law who’s angling for the family fortune. About his dead best friend, Skipper, who may or may not have wanted to hook up with him. Oh, and speaking of sex, they fight a lot about that, too. She hasn’t gotten any from him in a long time.”
Kyle raised her eyebrows. “Why not? The way she looked in that white dress? I totally would have hit that.”
“Oh, so you did see the movie?”
“Um, maybe?”
Actually, Kyle had read the play last night, cover to cover, and had liked it so much that she had watched the movie on iTunes, staying up till 2 A.M. But she wasn’t about to tell Benjy that. It was a lot more fun, making him work for his ten dollars an hour or whatever her Evil-with-a-capital-E parental units were paying him.
“And what did you think?” Benjy persisted.
“It was okay. I could have done better, though.”
“What do you mean?”
Kyle studied her nails, which were painted different shades of purple and black. “Like the chick who played the sister-in-law? I thought she was too over-the-top with that part. I would have toned it down, been more subtle. Yeah, Tennessee Williams’s lines were over-the-top to begin with. But why not play around with them, go deeper, give them some texture?”
“Really.” Benjy stared at her with interest. “I didn’t know you were into acting.”
“Who says I’m into acting?”
“You. The way your voice got all intense just now. And the way you used the word texture. You’re a closet thespian, Kyle.”
“I’m not gay. More like bi. Or bi-curious, anyway.”
“Thespian, not lesbian. Have you ever considered joining the drama club at school? You should totally check it out, it’s awesome.”
“Yeah, right. Like I’m going to hang out with you losers and recite Shakespeare or some medieval bullshit.”
“Our next production is a new play by a twenty-year-old Chilean writer. It’s based on her experiences as a child prostitute in Santiago.”
Kyle raised her eyebrows. That didn’t sound completely lame. But she wasn’t about to give Benjy the satisfaction. “Booooring,” she said out loud.
“If you say so.”
Yawning, Kyle picked up her phone and pretended to check her messages. As weird as it was, her stupid stepbrother was right about her. She was a closet thespian, which she was pretty sure meant a person in the acting profession. From the time she was five or six, when her father began taking her to private screenings of movies he had produced, she had dreamed about becoming an actress someday. Of course, she had never shared this piece of information with anyone, although her father seemed to just know, calling her his “little Audrey Hepburn” and clapping the loudest when she was a sunflower in the elementary school play.
Her father. She didn’t like thinking about him. It made her too depressed, and besides, it made her want to kill someone. Maybe her mother? So it was best to keep her mind a numb, emotionless blank slate as far as he was concerned, unless she wanted to start something. Which she didn’t.
“Yeah, they’re kind of looking for someone for the lead right now,” Benjy was saying. “It’s the young prostitute character who’s based on the playwright.”
“I think you should go for it,” Kyle said lightly. “Some hair extensions, lipstick, the right clothes . . . you’d be perfect!”
“Fuck you. I think I’ll tell your mom that you didn’t show up today.”
“Don’t you dare!”
Benjy held up Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. “I won’t tell if you can describe one of the play’s major themes to me. Like, how about the theme of ‘mendacity’?”
“Men-what?”
But Kyle knew perfectly well what mendacity was. It was something she was very good at.
Not being truthful.